We certainly haven't mastered language teaching, at least at public schools. What I remember most is being tested on verb conjugations of irregular verbs. Worst possible way to learn a language.
Languages and gym stick out to me as the most astounding educational failures in high school.
When I later actually wanted to learn about those on my own time, it became obvious that those initial classes were not only not helpful, but actively harmful.
High school language courses might just be overinfluenced by academic linguists-- obscure grammar is probably the right focus if your main interest is comparative linguistics and you've already studied six other languages. That just doesn't apply to many high schoolers.
High school fitness education is like a bad daycare with spontaneous expectations for you to run a couple miles, despite having never been trained in how to build up capacity slowly over time. It's as if the goal is to teach people that fitness is unlearnable and out of reach. It's exactly the opposite, it's one of the domains where it's easiest to measure how much consistent practice improves performance.
I feel like we could redesign both from scratch, based around how people grow up and actually learn these things, and we'd be way ahead.
I disagree on the gym/fitness angle. It's quite possible you had a terrible gym teacher, and it wasn't a good fit for you. But I think it's extremely important to introduce the idea of normal, daily exercise and give students explicit time for that in their schedule, and I don't think the average gym teacher is so bad as to negate that benefit.
Yeah, it's just anecdotal, and I don't want to take away anything from anyone's great gym memories, but I think there's something systemic, or at least common and broader than my own experience, for a few reasons.
I went to multiple schools with different teachers that all used the concept of modules to expose kids to a bunch of activities in rapid bursts without practicing or developing any skills.
Let's play badminton for a week, then football, then dodgeball, then baseball. Now let's administer the presidential fitness test without any warning or prep. No attempt to work on those measurers after the test, making it unclear how important they are.
I might have drawn all the bad teachers and was just unlucky, but my experience seems to track with most people I meet and also with portrayals of gym in popular media.
In my case, it made me hate exercise. I couldn't do the things they required (stuff like somersaults, jumping the pommel horse, etc.) so I just took an adversarial angle. It was not something to enjoy, but to try to beat if possible, or escape otherwise.
Many years later, I can kind of enjoy exercise like running or swimming but I still never go to gyms as they give me bad feelings.
Indeed, being a teacher myself today, I'd rate my gym teachers as terrible, as setting goals (like somersaults) with little relation to the actual exercise most people do, and more relation to innate talent than effort, while not providing much motivation or explanation of why that is useful (I still don't see why today), seems like a huge pedagogical failure. But I had various gym teachers and they all seemed cut from the same cloth, and other people with similar age and country give similar descriptions. Maybe it's better in other countries or it has improved by time, I don't know.
If gym is a child's introduction to the idea of normal, daily exercise all hope has already been lost.
A school or education system that was serious about exercise or fitness would look nothing like the American one. There would not be elementary schools without recess, exercise would be a part of every student's schedule every day and not taking part would not be an option.
As is gym class has to deal with absurdly huge variations in interest and ability. Some children exercise every day, or play multiple sports because they're either enthusiastic or genuinely athletic. Having them in the same class as bookworms and couch potatoes serves no one well.
Gym is awful and cannot be made not awful without a thoroughgoing reform, not of gym class, but of the entire education system. It would be better off burned to the ground. That way it would at least not teach many people that they hate exercise, it would just leave them indifferent.
