For the first time in a long time, this actually feels like a Friday. My usual Saturday morning class has been cancelled, so I've got nothing until Monday morning.
Well, maybe "nothing" isn't quite right. I should of course be getting ahead with planning, but I got into such a routine of waking up at 7:00 to start studying in these past few weeks that this morning I finally just got out of bed at 8:00 even though my alarm wasn't set to go off for another half hour. I just couldn't sleep anymore! So I know that tomorrow I'll be up bright and early once again and I can dig into the week's planning then. Tonight I just want to take it easy.
My new semester's classes began this week and I had my first "virtual" classes (basically like a one-way skype call) today. I have all three with the same professor: Svetlana Stefanova. She is not Spanish, that's for sure! ;) So I'm being taught about English grammar, phonetics, morphology and syntax by a foreigner... but really, I guess sometimes they're the best teachers.
We native speakers can use the language (usually) perfectly, or at least without too much trouble; but how many of you can do morphological analysis? Or point out the adverbial phrase in a sentence? And probably none of you could spell "mother" using the international phonetic alphabet! I don't know how useful any of this will be for my own teaching, but it is true that fluent speakers of a second language often know the grammar and rules inside and out while those of us who were born speaking the language haven't got a clue as to word order, sentence structure or what on Earth an extraposed subject is.
I find that this is true here in Spain. I can write and spell and form sentences better than many native sevillanos. That's not bragging; it's true. I haven't had the luxury of growing up speaking this language, where being surrounded by it naturally leads to near-perfect oral production before heading off to school and being introduced to the written word--struggling to memorize the rules of how all the letters come together to make the words we say; or how, in turn, those words come together in different patterns to make meaningful sentences. I have learned to speak and read and write Spanish all at once. Therefore, my spelling (in Spanish) is nearly perfect (a novelty for the girl who scored in the 9th percentile in spelling on her STAR test in the seventh grade).
So I guess it isn't so surprising that I now have a foreign teacher to tell me about all the intricacies of my own language that I never wanted to know. Still, I can't help but be annoyed that I have to take the classes at all. Sure, it's not all bad, and being the strange, language-loving, nerd that I am, I got sick pleasure out of doing an assignment for my morphology and syntax class three weeks ahead of schedule tonight. Breaking down words, designating the root, the bound inflectional suffixes, etc. it was like cracking an English-lover's code! And yet I worry about how long these new classes will hold my interest. It seems as though they'll lose their luster quickly, and then I'll just be stuck grinding through exercises with words like "predicative compliment" and "morpheme", or "non-finite verb." Only time will tell.
But I didn't really want to tell you about what a language nerd I am. What I wanted to tell you all was that despite the many things I could be doing or could have done this evening, I just decided to watch a movie. :) So while I did get a jump start on my morphology class and I did do some reading from my grammar book, I also just decided to enjoy my Friday and sit down on the couch with a good movie--The Silver Linings Playbook. I liked it and now I'm going to sleep.
TGIF
Friday, February 21, 2014
Saturday, February 8, 2014
Where does the time go?
I know, I know...beginning each new blog with an appology is becoming a routine!
I am sitting at the bar keeping Angelines company and enjoying the fleeting feeling of freedom that comes after finals. That's right, today were my final exams and now I have one week of "break" before the new semester begins. I say "break" because obviously I am still teaching my private classes this week. Even so, it is a relief to not have reading or assignments hanging at the back of my mind trying to catch my attention between, class prep. and life in general.
For probably the first time in my whole four years of school here, I began to study in earnest this semester a full two weeks before my exams. In the past I've always worked hard to get the maximum grade going into the exam and then not really worried too much about studying. This year I decided that it wasn't worth it to loose sleep during the semester, and going into the exam with fewer than the maximum, wasn't the end of the world. I decided I would study more and that would be that...
Changing things up worked out nicely during the semester--I wasn't nearly as worried or stressed about assignments. If I had time to do them, I did them. If I thought they were important to reinforce important aspects of the class, I did them. If they were worth a lot of points, I did them; but I didn't worry about letting a few slide. And surprisingly I found that giving myself permision to do less than 100%, actually motivated me to do more. I didn't achieve the full points possible in any of my classes going into the exams, but out of a possible four, I had more than three in all of them. I would say that's pretty good. In other years, I have stressed to get those four points and sometimes only gone into the exam with the same 3.3 that I had in two of this semester's courses!
And the fact that I didn't have the full credit forced me to do some good, old-fashioned studying, which was a huge help. It's not that I haven't studied at all in the past, but I usually just crammed in the four days leading up to the exams. This time, I reveiwed notes, re-highlighted my texts and wrote up concept maps of each unit. I prepared all 28 questions that one teacher gave us ahead of time to study from, and I wrote up a full lesson plan for my Didáctica de la Educación Plástica y Visual (my art class required that we write up a lesson plan in the exam aside from completing a multiple choice portion and an essay question!).
ASIDE: All this is to say that if I don't pass (or if I get anything less than a 7, let's be real!), I will be very sad.
As I was saying, the studying paid off. In my art exam, for example, I used the full two hours for the test, but I wasn't stressed at all. It was a great feeling. Of course, there were some questions I wasn't sure about, but all-in-all, I was able to do each of my three exams with very little problem and next to no stress--what a concept. I guess in the past maybe I've just been too confident in my bullsh*tting skills. ;) Feeling prepared was a welcome change.
There's not a whole lot of other news around here. 2014 has more than begun. I can't believe January is over already!
I'm not sure I mentioned it in my last post way back in January, but one of my New Year's Resolutions was to begin swimming again. I am happy to say we have now gone four times. :) Thursday was a great day in the pool. We usually spend about 45 min in the water. Getting to the pool takes about 25 min. and between changing clothes and showering, etc. we can't afford to be in the water much longer (depending on what time we leave home, of course). Anyway, in 45 min, I swam a mile and it felt great--a total disconnect between mind and body. It was like I was watching myself go back and forth across the pool: breathing and moving, the coordination came naturally. And I didn't even feel like I was working. My pulse must have been up, but I never got that squeezing feeling in my chest like my heart was going to come bursting out.
So despite my recent lack of blogging, I am actually feeling much more balanced than I have over the last few months. Christmas was stressful, so January was a lot of playing catch-up and recently things have been calming down again. Judging by the length of this blog (I could go on...), you can tell I've also been dying to get on here and write! Now that my exams are out of the way, I think I'll be able to get back into a propper blogging routine. ;)
Cheers!
I am sitting at the bar keeping Angelines company and enjoying the fleeting feeling of freedom that comes after finals. That's right, today were my final exams and now I have one week of "break" before the new semester begins. I say "break" because obviously I am still teaching my private classes this week. Even so, it is a relief to not have reading or assignments hanging at the back of my mind trying to catch my attention between, class prep. and life in general.
For probably the first time in my whole four years of school here, I began to study in earnest this semester a full two weeks before my exams. In the past I've always worked hard to get the maximum grade going into the exam and then not really worried too much about studying. This year I decided that it wasn't worth it to loose sleep during the semester, and going into the exam with fewer than the maximum, wasn't the end of the world. I decided I would study more and that would be that...
Changing things up worked out nicely during the semester--I wasn't nearly as worried or stressed about assignments. If I had time to do them, I did them. If I thought they were important to reinforce important aspects of the class, I did them. If they were worth a lot of points, I did them; but I didn't worry about letting a few slide. And surprisingly I found that giving myself permision to do less than 100%, actually motivated me to do more. I didn't achieve the full points possible in any of my classes going into the exams, but out of a possible four, I had more than three in all of them. I would say that's pretty good. In other years, I have stressed to get those four points and sometimes only gone into the exam with the same 3.3 that I had in two of this semester's courses!
And the fact that I didn't have the full credit forced me to do some good, old-fashioned studying, which was a huge help. It's not that I haven't studied at all in the past, but I usually just crammed in the four days leading up to the exams. This time, I reveiwed notes, re-highlighted my texts and wrote up concept maps of each unit. I prepared all 28 questions that one teacher gave us ahead of time to study from, and I wrote up a full lesson plan for my Didáctica de la Educación Plástica y Visual (my art class required that we write up a lesson plan in the exam aside from completing a multiple choice portion and an essay question!).
ASIDE: All this is to say that if I don't pass (or if I get anything less than a 7, let's be real!), I will be very sad.
As I was saying, the studying paid off. In my art exam, for example, I used the full two hours for the test, but I wasn't stressed at all. It was a great feeling. Of course, there were some questions I wasn't sure about, but all-in-all, I was able to do each of my three exams with very little problem and next to no stress--what a concept. I guess in the past maybe I've just been too confident in my bullsh*tting skills. ;) Feeling prepared was a welcome change.
There's not a whole lot of other news around here. 2014 has more than begun. I can't believe January is over already!
I'm not sure I mentioned it in my last post way back in January, but one of my New Year's Resolutions was to begin swimming again. I am happy to say we have now gone four times. :) Thursday was a great day in the pool. We usually spend about 45 min in the water. Getting to the pool takes about 25 min. and between changing clothes and showering, etc. we can't afford to be in the water much longer (depending on what time we leave home, of course). Anyway, in 45 min, I swam a mile and it felt great--a total disconnect between mind and body. It was like I was watching myself go back and forth across the pool: breathing and moving, the coordination came naturally. And I didn't even feel like I was working. My pulse must have been up, but I never got that squeezing feeling in my chest like my heart was going to come bursting out.
So despite my recent lack of blogging, I am actually feeling much more balanced than I have over the last few months. Christmas was stressful, so January was a lot of playing catch-up and recently things have been calming down again. Judging by the length of this blog (I could go on...), you can tell I've also been dying to get on here and write! Now that my exams are out of the way, I think I'll be able to get back into a propper blogging routine. ;)
Cheers!
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