also taught 1st-year Spanish. Her conversational ability was severely limited - not a natural polyglot at all - but she knew and taught grammar.
Those who taught more advance Spanish classes said her students were much better prepared and learned better and faster.

Army Language School drilled Russian grammar into me and while my vocabulary was 70% military, the grammar is still second nature to me 50 years later.

BTW: WTF does 'grammar is too partiarchal" mean?

It is worth remembering that the Founding Fathers were all traitors.

I was always amazed that she never learned to "diagram a sentence" in school; grammer was never taught. She was able to compose paragraphs well enough to graduate from a state university though. Seeing some of her text messages indicates that grammer would've been a wasted skill today.

about 4 years ago i was trying to help this guy from america learn german. i started by trying to explain the sentence structure in german, and i said ok, here is the subject, and here is the verb.

he said

whats a subject and a verb?

this guy graduated a year later with an MBA... and never learned the first thing in german. sadly thats typical today....

that 90% of what 90% of people do can be done by the most ignorant 10%.
That's why I differentiate training (Med School, MBA, etc.) from education.

It is worth remembering that the Founding Fathers were all traitors.

I learned grammar in the 10th grade of high school in '97 or '98. It was drilled into me for the better part of a year. Was my school unusual?

The funny thing is that the particular teacher I had was known to be one of the worst teachers in the school. He overemphasized rote work from our textbook, rarely checked our homework, and I'm pretty sure that he showed up to school drunk a few times. He was definitely high when he proctored our final exam.

Yet I really learned grammar in that class.

To facile and glib needs citation.

...begins in the first grade. As juniors in high school fully 90% cannot speak English. They can read. They cannot speak. Because most of the teachers are experts in English grammar one would expect the students to learn; but because most Thai teachers themselves can't pronounce or speak English, the students only learn grammar and the quality of that is questionable.
Grammar is the focus because of the lack of speaking ability; so the government hires native English speakers to teach listening and speaking only, no grammar. But after 9 years of grammar lessons, that is a daunting task.
My point is this; not discounting the value of grammar, but, students would be far better off learning speaking and listening for the first 9 years. My value as a native speaker is in the fact that in my very speaking are grammar lessons. Listening to the sentence structure of the one speaking.
Here in LOS this isn't even a debate any more; it's just so obvious the system has failed.
The biggest problem implementing a solution is the shortage of qualified Thai and native English speakers.

Grammar can be learned without being specifically taught, since it's implicit in a language. However, to learn it requires really mastering the language, particularly the exceptions that are part of any tongue (and some are not learned by all native speakers). To me, grammar is the easiest part to learn and I can't understand why it's such a big deal.

I learned some Japanese simply by living there 2+ years. Not to talk philosophy but enough to travel with - food, lodging, transportation.

I studied Chinese for a 3 quarters, 1 hour/day 5 days/week, cannot read more than a few characters, cannot understand it and refuse to make a fool of myself trying to speak it.

I learned some German by taking a 1-year college course in 1 quarter instead of over 3 quarters - 3 hours/day 5 days/week. I read German poetry and straightforward prose and could travel on it.

I learned Russian at the Army Language School, 8 hours/day, 5 days/week for 6 months - and about 50% of my off-hour time. The military has no time, patience or inclination to deal with theory or fads - they go with what works. They taught, I learned.
A typical day started with a hour or so reviewing the previous day's lesson, followed by today's new bit of grammar, then drill, then variations/exceptions, practice and dictation.
The grammar process might be:
Singular Masculine nouns in Nominative case.
Singular Feminine nouns in Nominative case.
Singular Neuter nouns in Nominative case.
...
Plural Neuter nouns in Instrumental case.
...
Imperfect verbs, past tense, feminine subject.
...
Irregular perfect verbs....etc
etc
etc.

Each day a new aspect of grammar, each day drilling in that new lesson.

While our training was to enable us to understand Russian, they felt the ability to speak it was a big help. They gave us books containing stories in pictures, without any dialog. We had to compose the dialog to match the stories.
That was the best practice method I've come across, since we had to have sufficient vocabulary and use correct grammar. Some students described the stories very simply: "The soldier sees the planes". Some composed more elaborately: "The solder watching the bomber squadron flying overhead is wondering if they are going to land at the local airbase".

The grammar is still with me, along with the accent. Within my limited [military] vocabulary, I'm as fluent as I was 50 years ago.

Bottom line:
Intensive training - immersion programs are much more effective. Grammar taught as an abstraction probably bores students but grammar made a part of dialog simply becomes automatic.

It is worth remembering that the Founding Fathers were all traitors.