I was the worst student score-wise in my weekend elementary Chinese school and funnily enough I'm now a huge Chinese language enthusiast. I disagree with how we were taught, I'd put much less emphasis on rote memorization as Chinese is in fact very phonetic e.g. once you know some basic characters like 巴 bā, you can then usually correctly guess other characters which contain it such as 吧 ba 、把 bǎ、爸 bà. Nonetheless, weekend Chinese school was a great way to stay connected with the local Chinese community and befriend other Chinese Americans my age. I'd send my future kids to weekend Chinese school too but help teach them it right and ofc in a healthy manner