4 years ago, after a short time working as an ESL teacher, I started NoteFull. I didn’t start it originally to help students with the TOEFL but to help them with grammar. You see, I always felt that most grammar books were good, but I never really felt that they were great, either because of my inexperience, insight, or some mixture of the two. To my great joy, many students sent constant positive feedback about the book. Motivated, I continued with it by working on a second draft with better organization and exercises.
However, as this was happening, I moved from teaching ESL to teaching the TOEFL. As time went on and I became familiar with all of the major TOEFL test preparation books, and many minor ones, I found out something incredible: they were. . . well, not very good. Each was well written and if studied intensely, would deliver a higher score. But, each was never quite accurate. Having taken the test myself, I saw the difference and knew that students weren’t improving as quickly as they could because the material just wasn’t as good as it needed to be. I felt as though I was teaching my students how to build a boat without ever letting them see one; they could only get the idea of how to improve and not specific tools and techniques to improve.
It was then that I made the hard decision to take my time away from my beloved grammar book and focus on creating a better aid to the TOEFL. After a lot of hard thought, I knew that the first step would be to create speaking and writing practice because no book I ever read, taught with, or looked at provided accurate questions of both of those sections. I also knew that most of these books taught general strategies to those sections that didn’t really help students improve quickly. The books were good, but I felt that I could do it better. I wanted to make things clearer, 100% clear.
That has been my goal throughout my entire career; it was why I started my grammar book. I believe that there is this idea that tests somehow measure more than a skill, but intelligence; that they are bigger and harder than they really are; that if you don’t succeed at them a few times, then you won’t ever succeed at them. I wanted to destroy that idea, and NoteFull was born from that desire.
What you see today is the result of years of hard work and focus and I am happy to say that it works. Nothing feels better than getting an email from students one day telling me how they’ve lost confidence and can’t improve, and then getting an email from the same students two months later telling me that they finally raised their scores. My passion, my goal, and what I work towards every day is achieving that: the replacement of frustration with confidence, the removal of disappointment. I attach my goals with yours and work hard every day to succeed.
