It's not the methods. If you and all the rest of your class would have been motivated the methods would have worked fine.
But following that it's a fair point that how we do things is not optimal. E.g. pushing kids into classes based on their age and than having everyone for the most part do the same things. People/kids are just different, different interests, different levels. Maybe it was a necessity once, but maybe we can do things differently now.
A grammar, written first approach is hard and boring but it does scale to 30 students for 1 teacher though.