I Wish I Knew How My Brain Works

[the_other_sandy]

The last chapter in my Spanish class has been all about the preterite tense. It was driving me crazy. For some reason, the verb endings were just not sticking in my head. We had the test on it last Monday. As usual, the test was preceded by a review. While we were doing the review questions, the instructor also graded our worksheets. Well, I made more mistakes on the worksheets than I ever have before. I was also completely teh fail at the review exercises; seriously, I got almost all of them wrong (fortunately, they don't count towards our grades). Needless to say, I was not overflowing with confidence when the test started.

Tonight, we got the tests back. I only got one question wrong and I got all three extra credit questions right (for the first time) for a grand total of 39 out of 37 points. How the heck did that happen?! I couldn't get anything right not ten minutes before the test started. Conversely, there's a girl who sits next to me who nails every question on the review exercises, then scores less than I do on the test every single time. Go fig.

I won't argue with the test results, but it would just be a lot less stressful on me if I knew for certain how my brain was going to behave on any given day.

Comments

[libra-traveller.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, a conundrum, maybe you're just very lucky you do review questions, because it gave you a chance to get the answers wrong so that you know how to do them afterwards. I wouldn't stress about your brain, just keep working hard in learning it. Oh, my grammar class is going well still.

[the-other-sandy.livejournal.com]

That was the weird thing--the review exercises contained mostly different verbs from the test in order to avoid just giving away test answers. As soon as the real test landed in front of me, answers just started popping into my head. I even spotted the trick question in the extra credit and got it right (2 of the EC questions were in the past tense, but the third was in the future tense, which was only covered briefly in the last chapter).

Oh, my grammar class is going well still.

Cool. How are they teaching English grammar now? (It was English you were taking, right?) Do they still make you diagram sentences?

[libra-traveller.livejournal.com]

Yeah we're diagramming sentences, but after talking with someone in that class, I realize that we're diagramming it differently then linguistics diagram them, which is the way I couldn't comprehend in elementary to high school. Yes it's English. The way we diagram it is basically just labeling things, like nouns with determiners and modifiers make up noun phrases, and verb phrases contain anything after the verb including adverbs and some prepositional phrases, what are subjects, what are direct objects, all that sorts of thing. I'm actually pretty good at it. The way my friend learned it in linguistics was basically coming up with the components and going down putting what words go where, which doesn't work for me. I like the labeling better.

[the-other-sandy.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah. I still have sentence diagramming trauma from 5th grade. Good thing I was a reader, or I would've been terrible at grammar.