Postby Iversen » Wed Oct 03, 2018 10:20 am
I forgot to mention my teacher in French at the gymnasium (i.e. high school, lycée), Carl Johan Olsen, who somehow had found out that I studied Italian and Spanish at home using textbooks - and when other pupils got questions in French he would without warning pose me one in Italian or Spanish. This really kept me doing my private homework with those languages.
Unfortunately the class was a 'mat-fys' one, i.e. on the mathematical-physical line, so even though he from day one attempted to do everything in French (the socalled natural method), he realised around the middle of the third and last year that the attempt had failed completely, and then he took decisive action to save us. We almost fell down from our chairs the first time he addressed us in Danish - he was of course Danish, but we had almost forgotten that he might know our language - and for the last six months or so he took us through the French language using the whole gamut of methods from the good old black school, like grammar, translations back and forth and (simple) wordlists ... and most of us passed the exam in French. This experience not only made me quite sceptical about the 'natural' method, but it was also a strong factor behind my decision never ever under any circumstances to become a teacher.
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