I had two classes today: Modern English Critical Thinking and English Speaking Class
In the morning, the professor of critical thinking class gave our midterm test sheets back and talked about the grading. There were two parts of this test, one was vocabulary test to match the words and phrases we learnt during the first half of this semester, another part was essay question. I was pretty surprised that I didn't make any mistakes in the first part. To be honest, I wasn't being a 'hard working' student when professor asked us to look up the important words we don't understand. I was being very lazy(無可救藥的懶惰) and didn't bother to look up any word! I even made up this excuse that looking up words in a dictionary wouldn't do much help but only slow you down on your reading progress. I thought it would be more important to finish the reading assignment and guess the words' meaning by the context and thus lead to the final goal of knowing the thesis of the article. In fact, a third of my answers for the first part vocabulary test were done by guessing. I was only guessing around when having my major test!
Now I'm not encouraging you to not to look up in a dictionary, don't get me wrong. Either electronic dictionary, online dictionary, or the heavy dictionary on the self, all of them are very useful when learning a foreign language. What I’m saying here is that sometimes and very often, looking up words constantly would kill the pleasure of reading. And like I said, it would only slow you down and there would be no more fun, then you wouldn’t want to read any further. So before you look up the word, try to guess the meaning by the context first. Is it an adjective or a verb? If you still can’t figure it out, see if it’s an important key word to know. Is it going to affect your understanding of the plot or logic? Read, guess, and think. From my experience, usually the words you look up in the dictionary won’t stay in your brain for too long; on the contrary, the words you read so many times that you eventually figure out the meaning, those are the words that stay in your mind forever.
I think I’m a little off subject.
Anyway, I was surprised. But that wasn’t just it. I thought the professor might not be conscious enough when grading my essay. I got 39 out of 40 for my essay. Shocking. Perhaps I should type out my essay and let you be the judge. ‘Well done’ was his comment. Well done? My Writing Class teacher thought my writing on the darn IELTS test was okay and tolerable. I was pretty discouraged by the disastrous IELTS writing practice and thought my English writing would be forever tolerable. But this gave me a little hope and confidence. I’ve always enjoyed this class the most. Modern English Class has been a comfort and that it reminds me the reason why I transferred. We would talk about issues and share our thoughts and the opinions on an issue, sometimes we would even have a little debate, which I thought was really cool. I like throwing out different thoughts when everybody seems to flow in one thought. I even wrote that global warming may be a swindle at the bottom of the paper after discussing about the consequences of global warming in my essay. From Critical thoughts to Skeptical, Innovative, Interesting, Weird, and finally crazy. lol People who think too much may become crazy in the end.
Another A+(100 out of 100) for my English Speaking and listening test was fairly easy. We had our listening test based upon a lecture, which obviously much slower than a real life lecture in an English speaking country and had some blanks to fill in the vocabulary. Again, I was only guessing the words I wasn’t sure (most of them I knew the meaning already) Well, perhaps guessing the meaning is a useful way when taking tests, so it’d be worthy to learn it, eh? Read the sentence, see if you recongnise the prefix or the root of the word and etc.
I don’t know what you would feel if you have two A+ s in one day. Maybe you would go have a feast with a bunch of friends or go to KTV and sing until morning. Well, I’m kind of a milder one that I couldn’t help but smile to everyone. And when classmates asked me about my weird phenomenon of high nineties, like “goodness, how in the world did you got this score for your essay!?” I was very pleased to tell them that they did a good job, too. I was just being bold enough to give strong (sometimes ridiculous) opinion and specific examples to a certain issue.
I felt happy today. And I feel happy this evening. Not only because of the A s I got today, but also the confidence I gained that encourages my frustrated soul. A final A+ s effect will be happening in a minute when I will have a good rest tonight and dream about going back to Taipei this weekend. With Mom and Dad, Gloria, Maranatha, Joy, and my little brother Emmanuel.
Cheers,
Yahsin
沒有留言:
張貼留言