Last Week of Autumn Semester

It is the last week of the semester and I can proudly say, with two hundred TWD in my wallet, that I have survived my credit card expiring. In other news, we were asked this week to submit feedback on the ICLP program. As I have voiced many of my complaints before to all of my teachers, I have no illusions that my responses can truly be considered anonymous, so I feel no compunction in sharing them here (yes, I realise the contradiction of nevertheless Americanising my spelling, which I do as a general rule to keep my responses as anonymous as possible):

In comparison with other language courses and programs I have taken in past years, ICLP's pedagogy has been the most disappointingly outdated. If teachers succeed at imparting language skills on their students, it is not thanks to the program's general approach to learning but in spite of it. My frustrations begin with the teaching materials, a large portion of the TOCC textbook having been written, apparently, during the lifetime of Chairman Mao. One way to help students engage with the material would be to substitute Mao for Xi Jinping and Zhou Enlai for Li Keqiang. But even an outdated, insultingly simplistic (and, in some places, thoroughly propagandistic) textbook can be rescued with the right pedagogical approach. The class's stress on rote memorization of the textbook was wholly unnecessary; it prioritized parroting sentences over understanding the logic behind underlying grammar structures. The material could be learned much more effectively by having students actively and creatively deploy these grammar structures, something which we only began to do, in a limited way, towards the end of the semester. It goes without saying that numerous studies have proved practical application of learned materials to yield much greater results than rote memorization. I have not enjoyed a single class of TOCC outside of presentation days, nor do I think I benefited from these classes as much as I could have. In closing, I can only add that I have little faith my criticism will change anything. Whenever I brought comments and suggestions before my teachers, they dismissed them by insisting that TOCC simply has to be taught this way. As a student who has taken classes in five different foreign languages, I highly doubt it. ICLP can and should change. It is saddening that even classes in mainland China take a more progressive approach to teaching than this program.