Diminishing returns (London)

(From googling)  Quote Diminishing returns is an economic principle stating that after a certain point, adding more of a single production input (like labor or capital) while keeping others constant leads to smaller incremental increases in output. Essentially, it is a point where extra effort or investment yields progressively smaller results. Unquote

    Valerio's comment on my "Marking homework" blog (https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2017/04/marking-homework-london.html):

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... I must disagree with the main assumption: that if somebody turns in perfect homework, then they are not learning anything new. If someone did not know how to write, then they attend your class, and then turn in perfectly written sentences as homework, I would conclude that they learned something new perfectly well from your class.

Unquote

My response:  This comment of yours is good massage for my ego, as it implies (if not actually says so in so many words) that I'm able to mould students who come in at zero-Chinese level (your "did not know how to write") into students who can "turn in perfectly written sentences as homework".  Yes, looked at from that angle (haha, couldn't resist a maths word play for a maths professor), it does make me look like a miracle worker... 

    However, the only students who joined my evening programme classes at zero-Chinese level were Grade 1 (Beginner) students.  (As the years went by, there were fewer and fewer of such students because more and more of them would've dipped into a bit of Chinese before they came to do the lessons, but yes, those wouldn't have done any written Chinese, it's true, mostly just basic Chinese on the romanisation / pinyin-spelling system.)

    Grade 1 (Beginner) students on the evening programme would've done about 150 characters (I think) by the end of the academic year (approx. 70 tuition hours), if my memory is not wrong -- I was on that programme 1985–2011, so details are starting to fade a bit in colour...

    A total of 150 characters is not a huge burden really at the end of a school year.  For homework, they had time to think / draft (unlike in a timed exam), so perfectly delivered homework (even a test paper) is not that difficult to achieve.

    This in itself turned out to be a problem, though, for higher grades.  As the workload got heavier (more characters, more vocab, more complex grammar), their grades would slide downwards as they climbed higher on the learning ladder.  

    I'd get students saying to me, "I got a distinction for Grade 1 -- a mark of 72 or 75, but for Grade 2, I got a B grade [a mark in the 60–69 range]; and a low B or a C grade for Grade 3.  I'm getting worse and worse."

    I had to tell them that it's the nature of the beast, especially since: 

(i) they were learning the language in a country where it was not used a lot outside the classroom (no internet in those days), unless they specifically joined Chinese-speaking groups (who wouldn't have covered the written script anyway); 

(ii) being evening programme students, they had full-time jobs and probably even full-time family commitments, without too much spare time to devote to the constant revision that the Chinese language demands of them.

(London)