A Review in the Amherst College Magazine

When standards are set and patterns evolve in the nation’s secondary education system, an Amherst mind is often found behind changes for the better. John Conner, head of the modern language department at Groton School, today represents the best of one of teaching’s great traditions. He is quietly but effectively reformulating the way Spanish is taught and learned in America’s schools.

As a Spanish teacher, John succeeds in placing his students in the best college programs in the nation. His students can be counted on to be both skilled in language and subtle in their reading and discussion of literature. Rather than being run by the Advanced Placement (AP) Language and Literature Examinations his students take, he has them master the exams as a pretext for creating experience no exam can measure.

John’s success in the classroom and his acute awareness of the level of skill and depth of commitment required to master a foreign language have not gone unnoticed. Leaders in Spanish education have observed that John’s students are privileged with a unique blend of competence, wit, and intellectual verve. Inevitably, the College Board has placed him on the Test Development Committee for the AP Language and Literature Examinations. Through that committee, John will help to construct a new generation of rigorous but authentic examinations for the nation’s college-bound students.

But what does a brilliant teacher do to enhance students? ability to meet the challenges of reading great literature, working for Amigos in Ecuador, and tutoring Hispanic children, as well as answering ever-more authentic and rigorous AP questions? For John Conner, who learned Spanish at Amherst College, the answer was to write a book. He set out to produce his own text, and created a remarkably effective instrument for the Spanish language classroom: Breaking the Spanish Barrier.

Like other creative minds, John knew how to make his text as subtle as it is practical. Students who need the basic points of grammar will find them here in straightforward explanations, with careful step-by-step instructions, along with humorous asides and unconventional examples. The book covers all the tenses and important grammatical structures through lucid explanations and practical exercises, yet with an upbeat tone, irony, and tongue-in-cheek élan that transcend the drill and enter the realm of pleasure.

But like other minds that have enhanced American secondary education, John is also doing something more powerful and elegant than obvious. He is actually making a case for the study of some aspects of the language through a simple but rigorous grammar. In order to accomplish this ostensibly obvious objective, he has used means recalling neither the cumbersome language mazes of the past, nor the mediocre avalanche of "immersion" experiences based on television soap operas.

Breaking the Spanish Barrier provides an alternative. It is a firm, granite foundation on which to build an unpretentious but effective Spanish program. It is a point of departure for forays into what has become an amazing range of authentic contacts with the Hispanic world. For example, Breaking the Spanish Barrier is an efficient complement to the Internet, which enables students to participate in international organizations in Spanish, and on which they can read Madrid’s El Pais or Barcelona’s La Vanguardia even before their roommates have received their daily paper.

Of course the book is also ideal for those students who would rather forgo the basics of language study altogether in order to read Allende, Borges, Cortazar, and other challenging authors in Spanish. And for the literate self-learner, or even the casual traveler, a version of the book is available with the full answer key. In effect, Breaking the Spanish Barrier is an unobtrusive part of the larger experience of learning in a world of global communication in which the command of language skills is a given, and failure is that for which the world is unforgiving.