What I want to see at the end of the semester is simple and clear: I want to see my students listen, speak, read and write in Chinese. I don't have a grandiose teaching philosophy, but my central principle of approaching students is to make them feel confident with the language. It is a foreign language after all, and it is a language from afar, and the least a teacher can do is to not let the students get scared of the strangeness of it.
Students often forget expressing oneself and communicating with others is a game rather than choosing one correct answer. If others don't understand you, change the words and see if that is working-give full play to your genius.

We all know feeling confident with a foreign language is not easy. On students’ part, it requires hard work: eight hour class, two quizzes, two home works, one oral individual tutorial, and a weekly test are the workloads they should bear every week. My appreciation to the diligent students! In my part, I try to make the class lively—learning a language should be fun, interesting, and intellectually challenging. Keeping track of everyone’s progress on weekly basis helps tailoring to individual student’s needs, and more importantly, not losing students lagging behind. A black boring-looking educator’s record roll book from my supervisor’s office certainly helps. I learned as a student that a teacher’s caring sentence or two could save you when you are stuck. Giving students access to me time-wise and mind-wise are another important requisite. Witnessing them beginning with Chinese ABC and two semesters later coming out with intelligent jokes and writing e-mails in Chinese in beautifully correct tones, pronunciation and characters is breathtaking. Gumption is the key in my class, and no complaint of ineptitude is acceptable before we try that one out in a fair game.