Language drills are often said to be a bad idea, but they are highly motivating and highly effective if you make them right and use them right. Nothing beats a good drill.

One thing is to match the amount of response time to the difficulty and complexity of the drill. How do you distinguish between difficulty and complexity? That takes too long to explain here, and you might not be interested in knowing, anyway.

Another thing is to put the right number and the right kind of items in the mix. This affects the difficulty and complexity. This too takes too long to explain.

But Max and Max Spanish uses drills whenever it seems good to do so. Students will eat a drill alive when it’s designed right. When drills are poorly designed, people and companies say mean things about them.

Lots of things make memory strong. I have shown hundreds of times that content can be mastered without writing, without workbooks and tests–tests as they are usually done. When we build interactive environments that rely on different kinds of responses in order for activity to continue, we are testing. We are drawing out responses. We are staying current. We are finding out where the student is all along the way, sometimes every moment. In this regard, writing is about as slow as you can go, unless you use very short responses. I love short, written responses because I can cover and reinforce so much more with the student.

You can work with text in many ways to retain it, and all adults and school-age kids I’ve known like working with text. Writing does add important options, such as making your own greeting card or other message, but the main thing is to learn the processes that are vital to communication in any form. Master those processes–decoding language and putting it together–and you have built powerful memory for text.

Written exercises are often part of an age-old tradition for keeping students busy and managing behavior. Writing eventually becomes very important in communication, but it is one of the slowest ways to learn language in the early stages.

Making standards meaningful in the classroom is possible if you have plenty of time for mastery.

Some people say standards are dumbed down. Maybe they mean mastery is dumbed down. Mastery takes lots of time, and the regular school schedule is more inflexible than ever.

Max and Max Spanish videos are made with this in mind. We get very strong, positive feedback from schools who understand that we are interested in real schedules, not theoretical ones. The only way to look at language standards in most K-8 situations is across the years, not year by year.

It’s smart to see them that way, because the daily school schedule rarely aligns with the standards.

I was on a plane out of state to collect material for video lessons. A woman asked if I could do her a favor and find an internet connection for her computer. No connection was available, as it turned out, and I’m glad because we started talking and I found that she teaches Spanish at a local university. She said everything that I like to say. About how language is taught in school. She’s disgusted with the overly academic approach to modern language. She said what I say, and it was so nice to hear it from her. What she and some of her colleagues want is to see their students leave with practical competence that justifies all the coursework. Something besides an A. Like I’ve said elsewhere more than once, almost every single school official I talk to about language tells me, “I took years of language in high school and college, and I can’t speak a word of it.”

At some point this needs to get through everyone’s head and into the brain. We learn useful language by being exposed to it over and over and over, and using it along the way without the pressure of upcoming tests. Language instruction needs lots of room for a climate of use, motivating the learning beyond class time.

It’s amazing how many public and private schools around the country have been dropping languages out of their curriculum. Enrollment in high school Spanish continues strong, more so as other languages are cut or allowed to fade out when a French or Japanese or Latin teacher retires or moves on. And in districts that bragged about their language programs in elementary and middle schools, most of that is history too. It’s happening fast along with the economic downturn, but it was already occurring during the past 10 years as schools have faced increasing pressure to produce high test scores in “basic” subject areas. Homes are still the one place where parents, if they want to, can single-handedly decide to make foreign language instruction happen. School administrators have very little room or money to work with at this time.