Nathan H
★★★★★
Cathy is super organized. She sent me a personalized Google sheet with our lesson resources, including:
a link to the class
link to course materials
our goals for the class
a table where we could enter new vocabulary as it came up. she wrote it out in Mandarin, Pinyin, and in English
We ended up using the bottom of the doc as a place to post screenshots of things we looked at during class.
I also entered my homework at the bottom of the doc, and I noticed that before today's lesson she has already evaluated my work and added comments.
Cathy then sent me an audio recording of her saying the new vocabulary after the class so I could listen, since I told her listening comprehension is the skill I struggle with the most.
I told her that one of my goals was to reach the point of being able to conduct the regular business of the class in Chinese, so we didn't even open the textbook and just worked on getting some basic practical phrases down that we could use for conducting classes going forward. We got about 17 new phrases in all.
Cathy also uses a lot of repetition in her classes, which is super helpful as a learning tool. When a new phrase comes up, she'll say it a couple of times at varying speeds so that I can hear how it's pronounced. This has been helpful since learning a tonal language is challenging, and I'm still developing my ear for what sounds "right."
For our first class, she also took time to look at how I was entering chinese characters on my phone and laptop (since I told her one of my goals was being able to participate in Chinese social media). She was able to recommend better apps and techniques, then walked me through installing them.
I hope that helps. To me these are all super desirable practices from a language teacher, especially the integration of Google docs into the lesson.