So I had my orientation today. It was like one of those horrible high school movies where the geeky girl does everything wrong and the day is a complete disaster. I took my placement exams for Greek and Latin at 8am this morning. Greek was a mess. It was a piece from Lucian and I just completely missed the vocabulary and it was a disaster. The Latin was better, it was some 4th century AD historian and I actually knew a significant portion of the vocabulary.
Of course, that wasn't the end of it. Due to a mix-up, I ended up really early for the luncheon. Worse, afterward the professor who was grading my Greek exam ran up to talk to me. I felt so completely embarrassed. Luckily he hadn't graded it yet, but that actually made me feel worse because he was so nice and he was going to soon look at such a complete disaster.
Going to see a production of the Trojan Women tomorrow. I will write a review.
I hate those first days too, but it always settles down pretty fast, once you get to know the ropes. What are your classes?
ReplyDeleteIf it's any consolation, I took the language diagnostic for our department this morning (2 hours; Caesar "Civil War," Ovid Met. VI, Plato Laws I, Euripides Helen) and it was awful. Awful awful awful. (Oddly enough, the Latin was worse than the Greek, probably because I've actually been reading Greek lately and haven't looked at Latin in nearly two years.) The very nice departmental secretary opened the event by telling us all they hadn't lost a student to the exam "yet," which was not as comforting as intended.
ReplyDeleteSue: I will get my classes this afternoon and definitely post about them.
ReplyDeleteHerodotus II: Sounds like it was hard! I only had prose passages, thankfully. And the Laws is tough at the best of times (partially because the speeches wind around in strange circles). I have to go meet today about classes. I cannot imagine it's going to be good. I'm sure you did fine on yours.