This is very a propos to the thread on joining organizations. If ACTFL or some organization were powerful enough to lay down the law on fl teaching ====== not methodology but academic freedom =========== so that admins could not dictate to a fl teacher, we would be better off. But I saw ACTFL jump right on board with Common Core and other “demands” on the teaching profession. I did go twice in my tenure at a private school b/c they paid for it; when I was in a public school and had to pay my own way, I went for the morale boosting effect of meeting with people who took fl seriously. For instance, people like Marty Abbott wrote two articles for Richard LaFleurs majorly (new adverb) influential book, Latin for the 21st Century that extolled the virtues of communicative teaching over drill n kill. Communicative is one step closer to CI, so don’t sneeze at it. Yet while Marty is a big-time ACTFL person, board members are restricted by all sorts of considerations. After all, Obama, who I support to the hilt, has been a disaster for education, but program heads etc. need the federal money and so the marching orders trickle down, unlike the economy, and we classroom teachers find ourselves at the bottom of the hill down which you-know-what flows.
But if every fl teacher belonged to ACTFL or some other org, we could afford to stand up to educrats. Right now each teacher is beholden to his admin who took 2 years of h.s. French and thinks the pin-the-ending-on-the-verb approach is academically sound and rigorous (I went through that and left on account of it) that and my salary was killing me on taxes. I want to be honest. Also I was getting up into my 70s and had arthritis in my knees…………. OK, another reason I don’t post these directly to the list.
Anyway, I can’t blame anyone for not wanting to go through the hassle of paying for membership, traveling to conferences, paying for them and lodging when no per diem is available. That’s why ACTFL continues to be dominated by more conservative or legacy elements of the profession; they work in venues where professional development money is available. The rest of us have to be content with PD that doesn’t even recognize fl (with one wonderful exception: AVID).