Windchimes

1 down, 2 to go/ foreign language student nightmares

Turned in the German paper that was due today. It was supposed to be four pages, I had almost five, and I didn't really get finished writing it, just had to stop due to the approaching deadline. No congratulations deserved there, I'm sure it's chock-full of grammatical errors and unclear sentences, and besides that, it's only that long because I didn't really frame the study very well to start with. I think all my arguments are plausible this time though.

My personal re-occuring nightmare...the professor has written "unclear" or a simple question mark next to a sentence, and when I look at it again, I can't tell what the hell I was talking about there, either. Comes, probably, from flailing about for so many new words, as happens whenever one tries to discuss something they've never discussed before in a non-maternal language. Heck, sometimes happens in one's maternal language, too. I just hope most of the main ideas can still be extracted from each paragraph, and that the ideas aren't totally ridiculous and unsupportable.

My paranoia kicks in whenever I imagine any of my professors reading the papers I write, even though I know they're not going to sit there banging their fist to their forehead over how illogically I've argued a point, or even over how silly the point I'm arguing might be. That's just the image I project on to them as I'm writing, usually, because I always have the sneaking suspicion that I'm going to do something like that when I read the paper after I get it back. However, it's highly likely that anyone who reads student papers with such an attitude doesn't last very long as a teacher...they'd just get too annoyed too quickly.



J.H. Larrew
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