A) Classroom issues.
I) Student-based.
1) They never stop talking. Ever. I can count on one hand the number of times the class has been completely quiet and listening to whatever teacher we had that day, and it was a day we had six out of twenty students in class, all the quiet ones.
2) When reading from the dialogue, -none of them- are ever in synch with anyone else, so attempting to follow along is like corralling a swarm of dogs. This also feeds into problem B.
3) Most are consistently fifteen or so minutes late, slam the door when they enter, slam their chair back, let out big heaving fucking sighs when the drop their shit on the table and take no less than two minutes before they stop making arrival noises, all while flat-out ignoring the teacher and drowning her/him out.
4) The same applies to after the break is over; it takes up to thirty minutes for everyone to come back from what should be a ten-minute break and start "paying attention" again.
5) The class is effectively a splice of two different ones; a fragment of my old class and another, smaller class, because my teacher for the first half of the year didn't return for this semester, so I know pretty much no one in this class and they're too interested in socializing with each other in Russian.
6) Of the people who are from my class, we have the girl from Kazakhstan and two guys from Vietnam who all cheat off each other (admittedly all three are rather smart on their own anyway and study hard so I'm not terribly bitter over this one, they'd do well anyway but they're all perfectionists), the girl from Colombia who just hits on one of the guys from Vietnam most of the time nowadays and the guy from Canada who was pretty much my only friend in the class but hasn't shown up since before midterms.
II) Teacher issues.
1) You tell us that we just have three sentences for dictation! Sentences are okay. Paragraphs, however, are not really sentences, no matter how many full stops you remove, and this is true in Chinese as well as English.
2) Furthermore, you tell us to memorize these "sentences" - which are often decently changed in order if not in content from what we have in the book - after reading them twice and hearing you tell them to us in short, fragmented, quick bursts that we can't remember long enough to write it all down while also remembering what the fuck you're saying now.
3) Also, testing us on EVERY SINGLE VOCABULARY, no matter how little it's actually used, how stupid writing it is (and rest assured you won't demonstrate it for us beforehand, since of course we're perfect Chinese students and know precisely how to write everything in the correct order, it comes naturally like wagons before horses) is counterproductive, doubly so when you subvert your own purpose and just have the same goddamn person do it every time, though at least that's a mercy in disguise.
4) It is not that difficult to not make the fingernails-on-blackboard sound when writing. Please avoid doing so.
5) This is doubly an issue when the tone of the lecture is a complete drone only really adding tones at the end of sentences where they're really not that helpful because they'd likely slow you down if you actually said them in the words but of course you don't because that'd stop you from getting through every lesson in three days like clockwork leaving behind all its goddamn gears.
B) Textbook/test issues.
1) We can't hear the dialogue in the text. We can only read it. Please stop presuming that we will immediately know how to say the characters in the books, because Chinese has many characters which change pronunciations completely and it is not immediately obvious which one it is, except maybe to the authors. So clearly this is a textbook directed to Chinese authors.
2) Furthermore, please for the love of all that is good and holy, stop testing us on trap questions even worse than my eleventh grade Physics teacher's tests. Asking us what "bu de/dei" 不得 effectively means is a stupid as fuck idea if not only the context implies "no need" as a meaning could work (bu dei), but not having told us what "bu de" means and in fact only ever using "de" as the verb->adjective hookup up to this point in any of the books. We are not Chinese, we do not know that "bu dei" is never used in Chinese. It is perfectly logical to presume this sort of stuff, penalizing us because your teachers have taught from the book and thus never covered this sort of stuff is complete fucking bullshit.
3) Is it that hard to add a Pinyin section, even, say, at the end of the book? I know, I know, it's a crutch, but with the issues taken above it's sometimes close to impossible to know what the book is talking about, and it would make speaking practice far simpler because you provide how the dialogues actually are written out so the student can practice just like a good little student should.
4) Furthermore, is it that hard to pull the collective moralcock out and actually write or choose interesting dialogues that make clear the grammar and vocabulary? I'd imagine this isn't too difficult, I've had multiple books which have managed this, but this school's favorite books to teach from are complete shit in this regard. Congratulations, a guy is unlucky. This is completely uninteresting because there is nothing interesting or really ironic about it, he is just whining about how he tries to be a good person but shit goes wrong. This is the sort of thing that fails to hit anyone in most any class, thanks.
C) Migraine
Self-explanatory. Been going on for a month before last Wednesday when it went away, now it's back again and I'm hoping my final pill kicks it out before it settles in again.
D) Conclusion
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