Heh. Yeah, you should have been made to learn statistics :P But I think it's pretty common not to because people don't understand statistics. I think I've told this story before (maybe I told it to luzula), but the lab group I was loosely associated with had a journal club where we talked about scientific articles, and the guy in it who had done some biology in a past life would always bring up a bio/med paper and talk through their misuse of statistics, and it was horrifying.
On Medieval Welsh: Yeah, that's bizarre. I was in a first-year (UNDERGRAD) program for Medieval Welsh language/lit for one trimester, and we did Branwen in that trimester (after doing a couple of weeks of grammar), and it was fine? I don't remember the language portion being particularly taxing nor did I spend much time on it (I spent much more time on the lit part, which I found fascinating, and my teacher was a kindred spirit who would give me more books to read, which made us both very happy (except when we did Dafydd ap Gwilym, whom I disliked)). On the other hand, the class did not do the appalling thing where we were discouraged from seeking out other translations! (That would also have been weird, because all of us had probably read it in translation before taking the class, and I remember reading a bunch of Mabinogion lit articles which would have been sort of weird to read if one wasn't familiar with the text in translation at least.) This was not a US graduate language program, though, so I suppose not subject to the terrible pedagogy you have described to me before.
Re: Grad school
On Medieval Welsh: Yeah, that's bizarre. I was in a first-year (UNDERGRAD) program for Medieval Welsh language/lit for one trimester, and we did Branwen in that trimester (after doing a couple of weeks of grammar), and it was fine? I don't remember the language portion being particularly taxing nor did I spend much time on it (I spent much more time on the lit part, which I found fascinating, and my teacher was a kindred spirit who would give me more books to read, which made us both very happy (except when we did Dafydd ap Gwilym, whom I disliked)). On the other hand, the class did not do the appalling thing where we were discouraged from seeking out other translations! (That would also have been weird, because all of us had probably read it in translation before taking the class, and I remember reading a bunch of Mabinogion lit articles which would have been sort of weird to read if one wasn't familiar with the text in translation at least.) This was not a US graduate language program, though, so I suppose not subject to the terrible pedagogy you have described to me before.