Independent Reading Post 3

Prompt: 10
Chapters: 5 & 6

"I took three years of French in school, but learned next to nothing. The trouble was that the textbooks were so amazingly useless. They were always written by somebody clearly out of touch with the Francophile world-Professor Marvis Frisbee of the Highway 68 State Teachers College at Windstock, North Dakota, or something- and at no point did they intersect with the real world. They never told you any of the things you would need to know in France-how to engage a bidet, deal with a toilet matron, or kneecap a line jumper. They were always tediously preoccupied with classroom activities: hanging up coats in the cloakroom, cleaning the blackboard, opening the window, shutting the window, setting out the day's lessons. Even in the seventh grade I could see that this sort of thing would be of limited utility in the years ahead. How oftnn on a visit to France do you need to tell someone you want to clean a blackboard? How frequently do you wish to say: 'It is winter. Soon it will be spring.' In my experience, people know this already." (page 64)

This quote describes a phenomenon that I have questioned since 6th grade. I can totally connect to Bryson on this topic of useless foreign language textbooks. I have taken a Spanish class in school for 6 years and still can't speak a lick of the language, let alone enough to be usefull in a Spanish country. Bryson is completely correct in saying that the foriegn language textbooks focus on classroom activities and not usefull conversation. Bryson's frustration with this topic is very easy to connect to and the way he describes it is nothing short of perfect. Bryson connects this issue to his inability to eavesdrop on the French speaking people and what they are saying, which is something I think that I would be very frustrated with as well.