Reflections of a stormy petrel

I haven't taught Italian for a few years now, and even then my practice was to just take whatever my clients had been using. I never met any course that really made me jump up and down and say "Yes, that's it, that's how it should be taught"; besides, Italian can be taught for different purposes - modern conversational, business, literary and historical - and each has different issues. On the whole, I would always recommend anything that has a strong grammatical basis rather than insisting on pronunciation and conversation. And at some point you would have to spend some time in Italy, but that is in the future.