I finished 2/3 of my finals on Friday...so 2/3 of my teachers decided to skip the hassle of finals week and the three hour finals and decided instead to give them to us early. My Shakespeare as Lit. teacher, Nada, has decided to utilize the two hours given during finals week. In fact, she's offered an extra two hours because her finals tend to take a while to complete.
Nada is by far the most difficult teacher I have had so far in my entire academic experience [ever]. I have been a decent writer since middle school, and at this point I am fairly confident in my tenuous ability. The first paper I had to write for her was a four page paper analyzing a sonnet we had not discussed in class. I had absolutely no idea how I would go about analyzing a sonnet in more than one and a half pages; my ability to write semi-extensively about poetry has never been even almost on par with those who were quasi-competent. I decided to break it down quatrain by quatrain and derive what I could out of those lines, the couplet, and included a conclusion paragraph. I got an 80% on that paper, and I haven't earned that low a grade on a paper in a really, really, long time. Our extensive and very comprehensive midterm included TWO four page papers, followed by another four page paper with a 6 slide presentation and 30 line reading from one of the plays we covered, graded VERY. UNKINDLY. Followed by a ten page analysis paper on some aspect of Shakespeare's works (Elizabethan Sexuality as Reflected in the Sonnets) and a take-home final paper of 5 pages on the wrongs of King Lear. I have always been someone who could write an excellent scoring paper with little effort, and Nada really challenged that in me. She required that I be more insightful and more eloquent, and I'm sure I will benefit from her challenge in the long-term. I hope to someday be so astute in the subject of English Lit...I cannot recommend her highly enough.
I was invited to study with a girl I thought was French for the majority of the quarter--and a couple of other girls in my International Relations class. Aigul is actually from Kazakhstan and just happens to be fluent in French and Kazakh. I have considered her my secret competition in class...she can answer as many questions as I can (actually more...kills me) and has made a point to ask me any questions she might have. This wouldn't be weird, but I had been thinking of her as stupid smart all quarter and I thought she was challenging me when she would ask me questions. Because school is a competition to me for some reason I cannot describe.
Anyway, she was a fantastic and thorough study partner, and I really appreciated that about her. We studied for 6 hours straight and then e-mailed each other sample essay questions with the prompts our teacher gave us in our study guide. It felt really fucking good. If I don't get a 3.8-4.0 in that class, I'll be genuinely surprised.
I have Nada's final and 5 page paper to write, and as of around 3pm Monday, I'll be done with my A.A. As of 9:20 a.m. on March 26th, I will have started my first class towards my B.A. in English Literature at Seattle University.
FINALLY.
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