gingermilk
I don't think they were a complete waste of time, but they definitely had diminishing returns after the first few years. It's good as a kid to be forced to study some grammar to get through the boring parts of learning a new language, they stopped being useful after that, though.
My teachers knew their language decently, but not good enough to correct our pronunciation nor good enough to help us write more naturally.
Lessons consisted of reading some very sterile articles from our textbooks on English/French culture and doing the related exercises, usually answering some questions about the article we had just read. You could answer every question by copy and pasting the right phrase from the article, so they weren't very useful exercises.
