I am shocked by my son's bad language learning

I heard the most unpleasant piece of French I've heard in a long time the other day. What was worse, it came out of James' mouth. He has been learning French for an indeterminate amount of time (they just played at in in junior school, as far as I can tell) and he is two years behind where the government say he should be. Along with the rest of his class, I presume.

His French teacher is clearly of the old school. She started in lesson 1 on the gender of nouns. Then they progressed to topic-based learning, with written exercises and written homework.

The sentence that offended me so strongly was "Jay unn hamsteuh ett derks pwassonz."

"French doesn't sound anything like that!" I howled in protest.

"Whatever!" shrugged James.

I'm not standing for this. I stood over him until he logged onto LingQ and downloaded the first part of "Who is She?"

"Listen to it!" I commanded. "You don't have to understand it, you don't have to repeat it. Just listen to it. Over and over until you can hear the patterns. You wouldn't try and learn a piece of music from reading the notes and humming, would you?"

James protested about this cruel and unusual punishment (listening to French is soooo gay!) but he did it, at least while I was watching. Whether he'll do anything when I'm not there with that "I'm on a mission to stamp out bad language learning" look on my face is doubtful. I'm swimming against the tide of centuries of bad French teaching here.