![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
We had a pop quiz in my last Spanish class. I wound up doing better than I thought I would: 4 out of 4 points, plus 1 out of 2 extra credit points.
Tonight was the first big exam. We were told we were going to spend the first hour of class reviewing the material. Old school me thought the instructor was going to go over everything we'd learned so far. Instead, we got a quiz. There were 4 PowerPoint slides with questions on them. We got 3 minutes per slide to write down our answers on scratch paper, then we got into groups and spent 5 minutes per slide comparing answers and asking the instructor questions. It wasn't what I was expecting, but it turned out to be a good thing. For one thing, I totally screwed up one section of the quiz and was able to get that part straight in my head before the test, where it turned up again. For another thing, I think taking a little test that didn't count for anything first flipped a test taking switch in my brain or something, because by the time we started the real test, I wasn't nervous anymore and I was remembering all kinds of things I'd been having trouble with. I think I did pretty well on the test. At least, there was no point at which I was frozen in panic because I didn't recognize or couldn't remember something. The only part that I thought wasn't fair was the question that asked how old I was. We'd only learned the numbers up to 30, and I'm...older than that.
This class is going so much faster than what I'm used to. I'm really amazed at how much I've learned in a really short time. At this point in my college Russian and high school Spanish classes, we'd only covered the alphabet, a couple of simple common nouns, and one verb. Tonight, I got to write about which classes I was taking, whether I liked them or not, how many credit hours I had, where I was from, what I'm like, and then fill in the missing half of an entire conversation, all in complete sentences in Spanish. So far, I'm finding this a much more positive experience than my previous foreign language classes.
Tonight was the first big exam. We were told we were going to spend the first hour of class reviewing the material. Old school me thought the instructor was going to go over everything we'd learned so far. Instead, we got a quiz. There were 4 PowerPoint slides with questions on them. We got 3 minutes per slide to write down our answers on scratch paper, then we got into groups and spent 5 minutes per slide comparing answers and asking the instructor questions. It wasn't what I was expecting, but it turned out to be a good thing. For one thing, I totally screwed up one section of the quiz and was able to get that part straight in my head before the test, where it turned up again. For another thing, I think taking a little test that didn't count for anything first flipped a test taking switch in my brain or something, because by the time we started the real test, I wasn't nervous anymore and I was remembering all kinds of things I'd been having trouble with. I think I did pretty well on the test. At least, there was no point at which I was frozen in panic because I didn't recognize or couldn't remember something. The only part that I thought wasn't fair was the question that asked how old I was. We'd only learned the numbers up to 30, and I'm...older than that.
This class is going so much faster than what I'm used to. I'm really amazed at how much I've learned in a really short time. At this point in my college Russian and high school Spanish classes, we'd only covered the alphabet, a couple of simple common nouns, and one verb. Tonight, I got to write about which classes I was taking, whether I liked them or not, how many credit hours I had, where I was from, what I'm like, and then fill in the missing half of an entire conversation, all in complete sentences in Spanish. So far, I'm finding this a much more positive experience than my previous foreign language classes.
