Monday, September 24, 2007

Tell Me Why, I Don't Like Mondays.

My biology test today was hard. HARD. And I really knew the material. I could have a conversation with you about it. (Let me know if you ever just want to chat about nucleotides or eukaryotic cells.) It was a multiple choice test -- those always throw me a little anyway -- and this professor is very clever and she posed a lot of questions in ways that force you to think on more than one level, so it didn't feel so much like an evaluation of my familiarity with the material and concepts as a test of my logic skills. (For instance, she often included answers like "1 and 2 are both correct," or "two of the above are correct.") I rushed through the last several questions because time was running out, and on half the questions I didn't feel at all sure of my answers. Shit.

Biology and Spanish are really testing me. I study both subjects for at least a couple hours a day, often more, and several hours on the weekends, and still my grip is tenuous. Both classes require so much memorization, and it's relentless. This is the fourth week of classes, and I already have a stack of 250 words in Spanish that I need to know, besides the grammar. There are slightly fewer words to memorize in Biology, but they don't for the most part match a word in English that means the same thing. Rather, each word corresponds to at least a paragraph of plain English. And they're long fucking words!

I'm going to bed.

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