Week 3 is when I first started getting the inklings of burnout this summer, but it was also a a very fun week. We discussed philosophy and ethics in class, particularly drunk driving (酒後駕車）and the incident of “我爸是李剛！” It was both sobering and fascinating to see that around the world, the phenomenon of 官二代/明二代 is all the same — who you’re connected to can affect the carriage of justice, regardless of how your country’s political system is meant to run. However, this week I definitely started feeling pretty exhausted, both physically (I was averaging 5 hours of sleep for per night, which for those who are mentally grandmas like me, is not nearly enough) and emotionally. For some background on my learning style, I really thrived under the 101 & 102 system of memorizing short dialogues because we were learning practical, relevant conversations that we could use in real-life survival situations, and by listening to and repeating the dialogues for 2-3 hours straight, I was able to memorize anywhere from 8-10 lines a night perfectly. However, HTA’s pedagogy, at least for the 4th-year level, largely follows the cram school model of memorizing a large amount of information and parroting it in class, which questions or anything deviating from the teacher’s PPT discouraged. To provide a pretty extreme example of the type of learning environment at HTA, I remember asking my teacher to just repeat the question she had asked me about the lesson because I didn’t hear her clearly, and instead of repeating it, she just … skipped over me … and then repeated it for another student … I literally knew the answer, but I didn’t get a chance to talk for another 10 minutes because the teacher refused to repeat the question to me for some reason.
On another note regarding pedagogy, I’m still really bummed that at Williams (and most schools, it seems like) dialogues are phased out after the second-year level, because that system was incredibly transformative for me — it taught me that, with reasonable expectations (e.g. no more than a paragraph), I CAN retain and use information learned the night before. I still don’t understand why some teachers I spoke with at HTA and Williams believe that learning through memorizing dialogues is inherently a beginner-level strategy that must inherently be phased out after the second year — it’s possible to memorize increasingly complex sentences, but internalizing conversations that bear relevance to my life has honestly been the only reason I could even get this far in Chinese.
Honestly, ever since I returned to Williams after ICLP and began the 300 level last year, I’ve really been struggling to progress in Chinese because with my NVLD, I simply cannot learn efficiently if the class is reading and essay-based rather than short dialogue-based. It’s no teacher’s fault; it’s my own neurodivergence. It takes me forever to read just a sentence because all the characters, even extremely simple ones, all look the same to me, so I end up writing the pinyin in for each word, which takes forever when there are several paragraphs in each lesson. Even after listening closely to the audio countless times, as I discovered firsthand in the 300 level at Williams, I physically am incapable of memorizing more than the length of the dialogues in the 100-level per night. HTA’s 4th-year textbook lessons were basically longer and more formal versions of the lessons in 事事關心 (the Chinese 300 textbook at Williams), so if you did well in Chinese 300 at Williams, you will do well in 4th-year Chinese at HTA too! However, if you learn best through speaking, mastering, and internalizing short conversations, to be honest, from my experience, it’s very difficult to continue learning at Williams after the 200 level, or at HTA in general (again, I’ve heard the 200-level classes had more time dedicated to speaking, so perhaps if you’re a beginner learner with NVLD at Williams, HTA could still be a good fit for you). If you really thrived under the dialogue system in 101 & 102, I would stick with ICLP for sure — they focus much more on speaking ability by giving each student ample time to speak during class. In HTA’s defense, they are trying to improve all four of your basic language skills — reading, writing, listening, and speaking — rather than just listening and speaking, but ultimately in my opinion they ended up sacrificing both listening and speaking for reading and writing.