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Which brings me back to my struggles in school. What was I supposed to learn? There is the obvious answer to that question-- the times tables, spelling, grammar, the facts of American history-- but I'm not so sure. Every year our school system turns out straight-A students who have taken the same foreign language for years and yet can barely communicate with native speakers of that language. And that is because they do not study the language to speak it. Instead, they study the portion of the language that is most amenable to flash cards and pop quizzes; conjugations, vocabulary, declensions. This amenable portion of knowledge has great value, but removed from everyday life, it's just theory. Imagine learning to swim by reading and memorizing the steps of a front crawl but never jumping into a pool.
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