The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

I decided I'd like to get myself a Spanish grammar textbook so that I can re-teach it to myself. My experience in Germany, reviewing my German textbook, showed me that it can be a very effective learning tool. I have good, college-level textbooks now for German, French, and Russian that I trust can keep me fresh in my knowledge. But because I learned Spanish in high school, I don't have my own grammar book for it that I can use to review in the same way.

So yesterday I went to the BU bookstore and looked at the textbooks they had on the shelves for the BU students to use in their Spanish classes. I found one. I only found one (perhaps there were more, but their numbers were dwarfed by the vast stacks of the one I did find). It was terrible. It looked more like a high school textbook than a college one. College textbooks, like college courses, are really good at getting down to business and going over a lot of grammar, which is why I feel like such a book could be a good investment. Going through them can give you all the tools you need to start working with the language. But this book was so over-designed as to be rendered useless. It was full of pictures, color, sidebars… There might have been some grammar in it somewhere, but not that I could easily see. There was so much going on, graphically, that the words were completely drowned out. It looked like it was aimed at bored high school students who needed the book to entertain them in order to keep them focused. Grammar was an afterthought - the book was all about social studies: "Let's learn about Spanish-speaking people!"

Needless to say, I didn't buy it. But then, as it happened, last night I had to go over to Cambridge. While I was there I stopped in to look at the textbooks in the Harvard bookstore. They had several, and all of them were vastly better: mono- or dichromatic, but chock full of grammar. They were like the New York Times of textbooks, whereas the BU one was more like People magazine.

It's not that I object to color: my German and French books use some color and have some pictures and sidebars too. But they never interfere with the substance of the lesson. Neither did the ones at Harvard. The ones at Harvard understood that the students were ready to learn and so made it the number one priority to teach them, without the condescension and distraction inherent in the book used by BU.

The only downside with the Harvard books is that they were a little expensive, so I have not purchased one yet. But the shopping experience does make me glad that when I was an undergrad I chose not to attend BU, even though I'd applied and gotten in. The college language courses I'd had at Cal were distinctive in that they were HARD. Not impossibly hard, but there was none of this aesthetic coddling. And the results paid off: after one year of college French I had enough pieces of the language to be able to move there and start trying it out. (And had I been paying more attention in my Russian class, I'd have been able to speak that too…) Yet given the choice of books that BU seems to like to use, I don't think the same could have been said had I gone here instead.