A continuation of the retyping of a journal entry....you can find part 1 here, and you can skip it all together if you don't give a shit about what my former self thought...otherwise, read away. For those that haven't read these before, I retype them as they're written, with mistakes, stupid comments, so on. The picture, however, is not old. That's a June self-portrait.
"During the turbulent acquiring of a pack of males that accompanies in some form or another all growing up, I had fallen into a group of the cool but definitely not "most popular" group. While the really cool kids partied at R T's house or some other locale getting drunk and stoned, our less cool group frequented movies, played Capture the Flag and dated the girls that were very good looking, but not considered the hottest in the school.
For some one of our birthdays, we went to see the movie Panther, a classic bitch up and Hollywoodzation of a heated civil rights movement. For weeks, months even after seeing this film, our group walked around flashing fists at each other and calling out "power to the people."
As one might imagine, middle school teachers didn't have a very large tolerance for this kind of behavior. Shortly we were flashing the fists only on the blacktop at lunch or behind the teacher's back as she went to give us some new French verb to conjugate. Then, we passed notes, single fragments of paper carried clandestinely in a walk to the trash can or passed around the room carrying a single line.
Power to the people.
As I worry about the upcoming 10 days and my completely unintelligible communication, I curse Panther for cutting in on a vast portion of my French learning time.
Ah yes, Madame Tartera. I spent two grueling freshmen semesters evading her by hiding behind N B who sat in front of me. I spent an hour every morning hiding, trying to flirt with her through notes that never got anywhere, sipping hot chocolate and cramming desperately for vocabulary tests that I inevitably failed or barely passed.
A sidenote here about grades...I have found that the vastness of the academia have set in place a system not unlike the checks and balances that our government uses that, when used properly, can virtually guarantee passing for any slightly sentient being. Picture yourself as a very large, almost hairless laboratory rat. They give you chores, say fetch a piece of cheese. When you do, you are rewarded with said cheese.
Now, I was given weekly a set of twenty french words and their english equivalents. I was told to memorize those, spit them back out onto a piece of apper every Friday morning. In the system, however, I would have to be a complete moron to ever fail this course, even with poor performances on weekly vocab tests.
See, vocab tests were worth something around 20% of the grade with the final being 40, 25 midterm, 5% attendance and 10% participation. Here is the beauty of the system: cutting class before you are 18 is illegal. Right off the bat you've got 5% of your grade as an A. Madame Tartera rewarded any student who spoke up at least 8 times a week with an A in participation. This comes out to roughly under 2 comments per day. Of course, if you choose to you can always haul ass through Wednesday, raising your hand even when you KNOW the answer is wrong, just so Thursday and Friday you can come in, hide, flirt and be left generally alone.
At this point, just by virtue of showing up and being a loud mouth you've accumulated 15% of a grade that is a perfect 100. Now you're looking at the vocab. Roughly 16 weeks or so in a semester, 16 vocab tests. Tartera lets you drop your three lowest scores so you've gotta look at your performance through 13. The number game here must be applied. If you work hard the first month and a half, which is pretty standard measurement from the return to school mindstate of a 4.0 and the harsh reality of boredom and creative wastes of time that mark the particularly dull period between Halloween and Thanksgiving right before the final crunch. So let's assume that you put in 6 scores of 17 or above, giving you just under 50% of that 20 at a solid B. Factor in one perfect score, because there will be at least one week where every word clicks and you're looking at a first half average of around 87%. At this rate, if you pull an average of a C, allowing for one complete failure and a few more B-s.
With this, 35% of your grade is an almost even balance between 85-87% and 100%, leaving you in the A range.
The midterm is going to be multiple choice which gives any nonlanguage student a view of hope. There's 50 questions composing 75% of your score and a 10 line composition worth the hanging 25, and unlike the SATS, you don't get points for correctly identifying yourself.
If you have reached the mid point of the semester showing up everyday and talking at least twice, by pure osmosis alone you have to have absorbed enough French to write 10 lines. Hell, you aren't even a mammal if you can't come up with 10 sentences. And one thing about foreign language class is that 10 sentences means 10 parts of a capital letter to period, no length requirement here. We'll chalk up a solid B+ on this portion of the exam.
The multiple choice is where you sack up and study. You need to come out of this exam with nothing lower than a C- and more optimistically a B-. If you shoot for the B, you can drop 10 questions. Go through every question and answer only the easiest ones. Then go through a second time, tightening your requirements until you whittle it down to 10. Since to this point the instructions have been clear and concise, we'll assume that you follow this one correctly and walk out of the exam with a respectable 40/B+, rounding out to the constant 85%, not pulling down on your average and not helping it all that much.
The final is about the same, only you need to perform an oral as well. This is not something to be feared. Tartera is notoriously soft in her grading of these interviews which almost every language teacher is. You repeat the formula, only this time you aim to pull a 44 on the multiple choice which shouldn't be too hard at this point in the semester because the final is cumulative, which means you already studied half of the questions for the midterm. This will get you a solid overall B. Considering that all you did was attempt to not fail vocab and purposefully shoot for Bs. At this point, you ask Tartera for a meeting where you tell her how hard you've been trying but just can't seem to get it. By virtue of this interview, a show that you really care about her evaluation she bumps you into an A-.
This is the numbers game of school. You pick your battles in advance knowing exactly when you slack and when you sack. There's no surprises and almost every teacher will leave a few outs. Find these and exploit them and you have an excellent grade for what amounts to a series of planned C performances.
It was in this manner that I worked myself to a B+ and an A- putting in no more than 5-9 hours of work total per semester. Of course, it is probably, no, definitely this manner that leaves me in my current inability to speak any French as I embark to that country.....
TO BE CONTINUED
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