Thus Speaks the Broken Record

It’s only been an hour since taking my Latin final. I should feel a jubilant sense of relief, but because I’ve been so frustrated this semester—and because I know next semester is going to be much the same—the only relief I feel is a cognitive awareness that it is (temporarily) over. There hasn’t really been an emotional release, sadly.

This may be due to the fact that I unequivocally gave the worst test performance of my entire college career. This is not hyperbole. This is not drama. When we were given our exams, I was immediately aware of my troublesome situation. It was four pages of seemingly foreign material (no pun intended). We had to translate four snippets of Catullus (a Latin poet), three of which we had previously done as homework and one “sight passage.” I always do well on the sight passage because we are provided a fair amount of the vocabulary. As for the remaining chunks of poetry, one I had never seen before (due to my lacking diligence in the homework department), one was vaguely familiar, and one I remembered fairly well. Still, I had not actually studied any of these poems in preparation for the test at hand. And it’s not that I didn’t study. It’s just that one person can only study so much, and the enormity of the material precluded me from giving time to everything. (This is my continuous gripe about the teacher I had this semester—and will have again next semester for Greek—so forgive me.) Hence, half of my translations literally made no sense. I ended up with disjointed streams of words that didn’t even make complete sentences. And as for questions dealing with literary devices and themes, I bullcrapped most of them as well. It was a mess.

So all in all, I’m hoping to pull a B from the class, which seems feasible given the grades I’ve gotten on everything else. Still, a B would technically hurt my GPA, and this bugs me when I’ve put infinitely more time into this class than any other (aside from the last class I had from this professor). And, truth be known, I think my teacher docks you for non-participation, even though this isn’t officially required. Last semester, my final grade didn’t seem to reflect the grades I had received on individual assignments. I suspected I was getting punished for skipping out on “voluntary” and “non-graded” assignments and activities, and other people I know from the class felt the same way. This could be a problem for me this semester because a) I skipped many a class session, and b) I didn’t participate in a “non-graded” student-led lecture on a theme of our own choosing. Naturally, I pooh-pooh the whole structure of the class, but this shouldn’t give him the right to pooh-pooh on my grade. But he probably will.

So that’s my whining for the day. I had to get it off my chest. When I left school, the only thing that sounded soothing was to come home and write. Well, first I had to regurgitate my tired complaints to my wife, bless her soul. She’s heard them numerous times, but she’s always willing to lend an ear. Both ears, in fact. Now that’s love. But I best get going. My wife and I have to make gelatin salad for our family Christmas party tonight. Oh the joy…