Week 5 · With your teacher

Live class guide

For the teacher, and for the student to read before class.

60 minutes

Number drill, fast and unforgiving

12 minutes

Say numbers at natural speed and have the student write them. Mix the traps:

teen / ty pairs: 13/30, 15/50, 17/70
dropped “hundred and”: “two ten”, “three sixty”, “four twenty-five”
prices at speed: “that'll be nineteen fifty”
dates in American order: 3/9, 12/5, 4/7
a phone number said at full speed, twice

Then reverse it: the student says numbers and you write them. Production errors here are as expensive as perception errors, because a misheard number that gets repeated back wrong is how appointments go missing.

Counter and phone role-play

15 minutes

Play the cashier, the server, the receptionist. Talk at genuinely natural speed — slowing down here removes the whole point of the exercise.

Include at least one unexpected follow-up question (“Do you want that heated up?”) and one number the student has to repeat back.

Then do a phone version with both of you turned away from each other, so no lip-reading or expression is available. That single change makes the difficulty realistic.

Repair under pressure

8 minutes

Drill the phone kit until it is automatic: “Sorry, the line is bad”, “Let me read that back”, “Can you spell that?”

Students often treat asking for a repeat as a failure. Reframe it: reading a number back is what competent professionals do in their own language, every day.

Couldn't-Catch clinic

15 minutes · protect this

This week's list should be full of real-world entries rather than video ones. Prioritize those — they are the closest thing to the actual problem the course exists to solve.

Set up the final week

5 minutes

Confirm the student still has the Week 1 baseline and Week 3 midpoint recordings. Tell them the final class includes the same task again, and all three played in order.

Ask them now to look back over the whole Couldn't-Catch List and mark the three patterns that show up most. Week 6 is built around whatever those turn out to be, so this needs to happen before the last class, not during it.

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