Linguistic Interests

I have been going to language lessons for a while now. No, not to curb my torrets, but to try and learn to speak with the strange vocabulary of the locals.

These lessons have never been good, far from it.

In a class of 20, that all paid up front with no refund available, 6 now attend.

The way it works over here is that in order to become a citizen, or get a visa, you need to have 250 language credits. These are obtained by attending 5 language courses. This is probably where the problem starts.

No assesment whatsoever is performed on the students, so neither can teaching be assessed.

Yesterdays lesson took a new low...
Let me describe it here for you, I shall refer to 'The teacher' as Barry:

The lesson starts almost on time, and we are given 2 sheets of text and told to 'fill in the blanks'. The answers are given to us on a separate sheet, so it seems to be a rather pointless exercise, but we all do it nonetheless.

Barry then goes off to photocopy some lyrics to a song that he wants to play for us.....ok

The next 5 minutes I had to control myself from laughing as we listen to some terrible music and the chap sitting next to me decides to sing along to a tune he clearly doesn't know.

Barry apparently listens to this music 3 times a day. Not sure if it is for religious reasons, as i don't know what the song is about at this point.

In his great wisdom, Barry decides to translate the text for us. Since we are in a foreign language class, it would seem silly not to speak English for the next 30 minutes.

Oh, and it turns out we were listening to a love song. Barry kept on going on about it being beautiful. Bizarre, considering the song was written by a 60 yr old native about a teenage thai boy that cleaned elephants.