Wednesday, March 14, 2012

They call it intensive for a reason


Phew! Back from the Latin Intensive School (formerly called residential school)..... 9am -5pm  Latin for 3 days. 

Our lecturer supports the immersion method of language acquisition so all our text and a great deal of the teaching was in Latin. And of course we had to answer as much as we could in Latin - OMG!!! I must say though, I had a ball. I much prefer Latin over Linguistics or English so far.

What an interesting weekend..... 

Accommodation wouldn't have been a problem if I'd been going alone; I could have just stayed in one of the colleges but...... Huon is going through an anxious phase (he's afraid to be on his own and afraid that either Ian or myself won't come home) so we all drove up together very early Friday morning.



Apparently it was an auspicious date for holding events as, in addition to the Intensive, there was a music in the vineyard style concert which meant that every motel room and stable had been booked since December on the Saturday night. We were able to find a room Friday but had to head 40km out of town to find a room Saturday night. The motel on Friday night was close to the main road through town so not only did we have the local hoons squealing tyres and revving engines we also had lorries going past. Tired doesn't come close to how I felt for Saturday's class. 



You couldn't have swung a cat in the second motel room and quite unintentionally, I'm sure, it was back in vogue, being seriously vintage....including the bed. So, feeling as if I was living in some slightly out of phase reality I made it back for day 3. I was so tired at this point that I cared not a jot whether I made an ass of myself so I actually did better than previous days.



On arriving home, Sunday night, I all but passed out fully clothed on my beautiful, glorious, ever-so snuggly bed.

Today I nearly feel normal (whatever that is).

Monday, March 5, 2012

Deer in the headlights

I knew that uni was going to be a lot of work but....holy shit! I'm doing a 75% load and that still requires 45 hours a week. That's 9 hours a day if I only work 5 days or 7.something if I spread it over 6.  Jeeeeezus I'm glad I didn't sign up for the 4 unit trimester gig.

Studying by distance does have it's advantages but if I had a choice I think I'd rather be an on-campus student. We have forums where we can post questions or discuss the subjects and all the lecturers except one are really good at checking in at least once a day but I think it's a poor substitute for face to face input.

There appears to be a problem with our Classical Languages dept. or rather someone in the uni has caused a problem for them. I have no idea of the politics or whatever but our poor lecturer is having to teaching all the Greek and now the Latin stream as well. Why the uni wouldn't allow the prof that was going to take Latin to do so is anyone's guess.

When I'm not feeling like a deer in the headlights, I am really enjoying getting stuck in and ****brag alert**** we had the first of four Linguistic quizzes today.......results 23.75 out of 24. Only worth 10% but it's a start.

It's all go, next up is res school for Latin  - which should be loads of fun (and I'm not being sarcastic).