Anonymous wrote:DC was very unimpressed by a foreign language teacher at a test-in DCPS. The native-speaking students frequently needed to interject with corrections of tense and vocabulary.

Anonymous wrote:My DC's HS foreign language teacher constantly makes pretty serious errors in the language s/he teaches. As someone fluent in the said language, but not a naive speaker, I know that occasional mistakes/typos happen (I am sure there will be some in this posting!). However, this particular teacher makes many, many mistakes in pretty much every prompt/assignment s/he provides. The latest was in the mid-term assignment -- to the point that my DC actually pointed it out to me. What would you do? I am reluctant to complain to the administration (which has not been not very responsive at this articular school), but nor can I figure out how to bring it up gently with the teacher directly? Or should I just let it go and not worry about it?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:And btw, foreign language does NOT have to be taught by a native speaker.

No. But it's highly preferred. The exception is university professors with highly specialized skills (phonetics, history of the language etc)

--signed former language student

And all the mistakes OP refers to would not be made by a native speaker. But for instance, you can be taught Spanish by someone from Argentina or Mexico and it will sound completely different, include different idioms, and even additional verb conjugations (Vos, Vosotros), but you will learn the language if the teacher can teach.

The problem here appears that the teacher does not know the language s/he is teaching. That is not fixable.

We are at a great charter school and have been through 4 Spanish teachers in three years, and my child has not learned much. But we are not in a school where she can switch languages after her initial choice. And she is getting good grades. Unlike English, which she has to learn now, Spanish can be learned later on. If this class is your only worry you have truly landed in a very lucky place. But if you are going to go to anyone, go to the principal, preferably with some additional parents, at least one of them a native speaker......... If these errors are so glaring, and so prevalent, the teacher is probably not capable of fixing them, at least when speaking to the class...........

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:And btw, foreign language does NOT have to be taught by a native speaker.

No. But it's highly preferred. The exception is university professors with highly specialized skills (phonetics, history of the language etc)

--signed former language student

Anonymous wrote:My students love to point out the missing letter on the board, and I always thank them for catching my errors. I congratulate them on their attention to detail, and I remind them of the important of revising, editing and rewriting. Some can take it too far. I had a parent tell her child, a student of mine, that "earth" should be capitalized, not lowercase as I had written it. Instead of coming to me directly, the student told all of the students sitting around him that I had made a stupid mistake. I pulled the student aside after class and, in a brief private hallway conversation, explained that I was the teacher and he was the student, that I do make mistakes and don't mind being corrected, but that I resented having him instruct my students while I was instructing them, particularly because he gave them bad information. I assigned him a one-page paper on the contexts in which "earth" should be capitalized and the contexts in which "earth" should be lowercase.
I hope he asked Mom for help.
A few weeks later, I wove the Earth-v-earth explanation into a different lesson, hoping the students would understand the distinction without embarrassing my precocious, but likable student.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Teachers in our highly-rated FCPS (elementary) routinely make errors in spelling, to say nothing of apostrophe errors. It makes me crazy.

Ignorant and stupid people often focus on the wrong details like spelling and grammar.

Anonymous wrote:And btw, foreign language does NOT have to be taught by a native speaker.