I spent the entire day today studying for my ENG 525 Variety in Languages midterm.
I got to class with about 10 minutes to spare, and took a seat toward the back, where I’d have room to spread out my “resources” — as this was an open-book, open-notes test.
I just can’t find the words to describe this test. Let’s just say that from the last seven weeks we’ve spent copying pages and pages and pages of details off the board, we were expected to draw broad conclusions about them with regards to the field of linguistics.
The first part of the test was multiple choice with four dialects listed, and then a list of about 8 features, and we had to say in which dialects these features occur. A couple of them had two blanks, indicating that the feature occurred in two dialects.
After about 20 minutes of trying to figure that out, I thought, “This is only worth 20% of the grade; I’d better move on to the 80%.” (We had 1.5 hours to do this test.)
The second part involved 7 essay questions, from which we had to chose four and write about a one-page answer to each. I had to dismiss one of the questions right off the bat, as I had no idea to what the question referred in terms of what we had covered in class.
One of my answers, I had to completely re-write in the last five minutes of the time alloted, as I had scratched out so many things in it that I was afraid he wouldn’t be able to read my answer.
It was just incroyable. Just when you thought this course could not possibly get more tedious and frustrating: wallah!
One of my poor colleagues didn’t even get to a fourth question.
I left there and came home and did some emotional eating.
My affirmations came today via an e-mail from Irene:
| Thank you for being there and for bringing a light into my life that I have come to treasure and depend on. How lucky can one woman get!! |
And in a subsequent response to that after sharing it with Robert:
| Thank you for that, and to answer Irene’s “how lucky can one woman get,” I would have to say, as lucky as one man…me. |