Autumn reflections

The remains of summer have fizzled out unspectacularly, leaving the characteristic chill of autumn nights.  I cranked the heating into action once again, counting myself fortunate that since we had the new boiler fitted the gas bill these days is a mere shadow of its former self.  Doesn't stop spammers phoning regularly (or, more accurately, phoning the answerphone regularly) to remind me about the government boiler grant awaiting me alongside my unclaimed PPI refund.  Do people actually respond to this rubbish, I wonder?

And I've had time too to reflect on, and start coming to terms with, Raggs' passing away.  I got the casket containing her ashes back: one of my fellow students of Italian kindly gave me a lift to the vets' after our class on the Friday that week, and I carried it home on the bus in the little posh carrier bag looking for all the world as if I'd gone to do a bit of upmarket shopping!  I haven't yet decided what to do with them.  Although I'm conscious of the theory that clinging on to the remains acts as an impediment to grieving properly and letting nature take its course, I'm a little undecided.  I didn't want to scatter them in the woods as I had done with Molly, but I rather favour the idea of perhaps burying the casket in the garden amongst some spring bulbs to make something resembling a little shrine,  Maybe that in its own way is just as creepy an idea though.  For the moment I'm not in a hurry.  I find its presence acts as a comforting souvenir of the happy times we had together and I'm happy to accept it as that however ghoulish it may sound.  While I initially found it difficult to accept the proposition that we can't have another dog, the plain reality is that I don't any longer have either the physical ability or the lifestyle to walk as far or as regularly as I'd need to and it really wouldn't be fair or kind.  Even an older dog needs some exercise.  I haven't ruled out the idea of another cat on the other hand: maybe I'll just wait and see how things pan out.

And after a short summer break we start our Italian tutorial sessions again next week.  I did briefly resurrect the idea of going for an A level, but decided to plod on with our informal classes and buld up a bit more of a foundation while waiting to see how the transition from AS and A2 levels back to a proper 2-year course works out.  My practice is still sporadic and I have some "homework" exercises which I should have done and keep putting off but I'm heartened to find when I check out an Italian blog that I follow, I seem to be retaining more of what I've learned than I'd anticipated.  It's certainly encouraging me to keep at it, anyway.

A presto!

Because it was there

I'm at home at the moment, slowly recovering from a groin strain.  With some strong painkillers at last making inroads into some of the worst pain I can ever remember experiencing (in fact at the outset it was so bad I thought I must have got appendicitis - but the Doc when she examined me said not) I'm trying to rest and let nature take its healing course.  I've done something I'd thought of doing before on a number of occasions, which is to do the food shopping online.  I had been put off by pretty steep delivery charges as well as horror stories from people I know who've tried it, but the effect of what I suspect is quite keen competition in the market has resulted in a 24-hour turnaround process with some midweek timeslots of only £1 for the delivery.  So my first order arrived yesterday afternoon, complete and with no weird substitutions, and dead on time - well, two or three minutes early, actually.

The other side-effect of my 'convalescence' has been that I wasn't able to go to my Italian classes this week or last.  Which prompted me to think some more about the question of whether I really wanted to continue with them.  The clincher is/was that in contrast to my enthusiasm four years ago I wasn't really enjoying them much anymore - which in turn raised the question of what the point was of continuing with something you don't like and don't actually have to do.  I began to realize that I'd fallen into the trap of re-enrolling for another year just because it was there rather than because there was anything (such as an eventual qualification) specifically in view at the end of it.  While it's arguably not altogether wise to take decisions under the influence of feeling in pain and generally under the weather, I emailed the tutor to say I'd decided not to carry on.

Thinking back to the debacle which marked the end of my first attempt to learn Italian and which I wrote about in my last entry, I'm not about to give up a second time.  If I've learned anything at all from that, it's that opportunities now are way in excess of what existed then and it's simply a question of re-focusing on what it is that I'm ultimately trying to achieve, and seeking the best way of doing it.  I'm not sure whether I've written about this or not, but as my studies have progressed I made tentative enquiries about doing an A level.  The University, perhaps understandably, made it clear when I asked that I was on my own with that as far as they were concerned so I put it on the proverbial back burner. 

I've on the other hand been fortunate enough to stay in touch with a small group of fellow-students from when we had our Intermediate level classes together and we used to meet up for practice during the long summer holidays.  They started having private tuition and have agreed for me to join them when I'm up and running again, which will give me the opportunity to consolidate what I've learned so far and look at finding an A level course to do in the autumn.

While I'll always regret what slipped away from me the first time all those years ago, I'm determined to do everything I possibly can to make up for it now. 

Of ghosts and skeletons....

So it's Hallowe'en once again: the time of ghosts and skeletons, one of which I let out of its cupboard exactly five years ago this week.  The relevance of all this will hopefully become clear at the end of the story, so keep reading!

I've written and reminisced quite a lot over the last five years about my schooldays: they were happy times, the memory of which I've grown to treasure.  The culmination, back then, was that at the tender age of 17 I left school and went off one October's day down to Exeter to take up a place at Exeter University.  I was overjoyed at getting the grades I needed (two As and a C against an acceptance requiring two Bs), and full of optimism and plans for the future.  I'd always been young for my age, shy, timid and slow to make friends: whether I ignored that warning sign, didn't think it mattered or simply thought naïvely that it was magically somehow going to change I can't say.  But the constant round of partying, socializing and clubbing which is traditionally supposed to mark a Fresher's first experience of University just didn't happen for me.  I don't think any of my classmates from school had gone to Exeter too, so I didn't know anyone, and on the course we were split into different groups for different seminars and tutorials and so on.

The inevitable and predictable result was that after only a very short space of time I was lonely and homesick.  To make matters worse, two or three of the compulsory initial modules covered classical literature and drama, the very things I'd hated most about doing French A level at school.  I'd take copious notes in the lectures, but otherwise it was simply going in one ear and out of the other.  I'd re-read my notes in my room in the evenings and they wouldn't mean anything: it simply wouldn't sink in.  The rest of the time I whiled away listening to the radio or sometimes records, interspersed with an occasional trip to the communal TV lounge, hoping no-one else wanted to watch something else on one of the other channels.  On Thursday nights there was a "formal" Hall Dinner in the evening, so we all gathered together, dressed up in our suits and gowns, to watch as much as we could of "Top of the Pops" just before the dinner started!

The worst time was the weekend when there were no classes.  Saturdays I generally used to go into town for a spot of "retail therapy".  Most weeks it was just window shopping as although my parents had given me access to a savings account they'd started for me as a small child, it was only supposed to be for buying books and emergency essentials!  Sundays were especially awful.  I couldn't go home for the weekends - it was a four or five hour train journey each way even supposing I'd had the money for the return fare, and I think I managed it once in the whole term.  There was a payphone downstairs in the entrance hall, but this was in the days long before mobile phones, when "trunk" calls were prohibitively expensive.  So that just left letters and I wrote home as often as I could, eagerly checking my pigeon-hole each morning for a reply from home.  Somewhat peversely, in the light of what I've just written, I gave no inkling of how unhappy I was: I suppose I just didn't want to worry anyone.

Eventually Christmas came, and back home in all the excitement and festivities marking the occasion, I got a respite from my worries.  Returning in the New Year, I somehow hoped things would get better and I secretly resolved to try harder to make it all work.  If anything, it got worse.  The long dark nights and cold dismal days of winter and early spring did nothing to lift my low spirits.  I started to get lethargic and lose what little remaining interest I still had in the course - I couldn't settle down and I found myself struggling to keep my head above water with the work.  That said, it wasn't all bad: I was thrilled to hear that in my Italian language classes, which I'd started from scratch, was really enjoying, and which had been the main reason for my choosing Exeter in the first place, we were already up to an O level standard!  And I remember too the weekly trip up the hill on the other side of town on a Friday afternoon to where the Language Laboratory was situated, for the bizarre highlight of the week - a session listening to our own choice of current French pop songs, decyphering the lyrics and singing along karaoke-style!

The rest of that second term passed in something of a blur, proving I daresay the truth of the common supposition about the mind blotting out memories of unpleasant things.  Be that as it may, the next thing I recollect is the morning when I was upstairs at home, in the last week of the Easter vacation, helping my mother make the beds.  I was absolutely bricking it - in the knowledge that we were due to have exams just a week or two into the new term, and I had never been less prepared for anything in my life.  The phrase "preoccupied with failure" doesn't do my confused feelings justice, but then at that moment my mother suddenly looked me straight in the eye and said: "Why don't you tell me what's wrong?"

I sat down on the bed, tears welling up in my eyes, and blurted it all out: it was as if a dam had burst.  I wish I could say I felt better afterwards but I didn't.  I felt an abject failure: I'd let my parents down, dashed their hopes and denied them the pride of getting their only son through University successfully.  If there's been a lower point in my life - before or since - then I can't think of what it might be.  But my mother simply sat down on the bed beside me and said gently: "Well, if you don't like it, don't go back."  My sense of relief was indescribable.

I don't remember what my father said at the news, from which I deduce that I must've left it to my mother to tell both him and my sister - quite probably something along the lines of "This is what we've decided...!"  She was on the other hand insistent that I had to go back down to collect my things in person a couple of days before the new term started - a sort of object lesson in cleaning up your own mess after you.  While I was dreading it, the process of de-registering or dis-enrolling or whatever the proper word is for it turned out to be pretty painless.  In fact the general reaction from all the tutors was: "But why didn't you say anything??"  I didn't know how to answer that then and I don't really know now.  The closest I can get is to say that there were so many things wrong that I just honestly didn't know where to start.

My father gave me the news that one of our neighbours, who was a college lecturer, had offered to talk me through the idea of enrolling on a local language course as a day student instead.  But, with all my hopes dashed, what little self-confidence I had in tatters, and my plans for the future in ruins, I said no.  I'd fallen at the first hurdle and I didn't want the consolation prize: I just wanted to draw a line under it all and move on to something completely different.  My father was a bit disappointed and I can now see why.  I'd be lying if I said that I hadn't occasionally wondered idly over the years whether I shouldn't perhaps have swallowed my pride and tried to salvage something more from the wreckage.

In the emotional aftermath which followed, the whole episode rapidly became something of a taboo subject at home, and those few friends and acquaintances who were 'in the know' soon picked up on the vibes that I didn't want to talk about it.  On one of the rare occasions when it was mentioned, my mother confided in me that she believed the problem stemmed from the time I was put up a year in Junior School, becoming thereafter always the youngest in the class, and thus going off to University a year before my time - and she said she wished that hadn't happened.  Perhaps she was right: my emotional immaturity certainly added to my problems although I have considerable doubt as to whether an extra year on its own would've made that much real difference, taking into account all the other factors at play.  Whatever the answer, as time wore on, there was less and less need for anyone to even know it had ever happened and thus my 'secret' had lain hidden for some four decades before I plucked up the courage to "confess" and write about it.

Re-reading what I've written so far, I'm glad I opened up about it all five years ago.  The catharsis then has served to put it all into some sort of proper perspective and I think that on the whole I can take a more benign view of the experience.  I do still feel sad, thinking back: I was after all desperately miserable and what should've been one of the happiest periods of my life ended up seeming like an unmitigated disaster.  I feel tinges of regret, as I have done from time to time over the years when something would suddenly or unexpectedly remind me, for something which was simply not destined to happen - and I don't think those will ever entirely leave me.

But it's been the wistfulness which was the legacy of my abandoning my study of Italian 45 years ago, with nothing to show for it, that acted as the catalyst behind my decision to enrol for weekly classes, taking up in 2010 from where I'd left off.  On the whole both enjoyable and productive, it nevertheless hasn't been all totally plain sailing. I'm no longer as sharp as I was back in 1966, my memory isn't as retentive and I don't spend enough time in between classes immersing myself in the language anywhere near enough to being halfway fluent.  This year, my fifth, will be my last (on this course, at least - the current Advanced 2 being the top level).  I was a little in two minds about carrying on to the end, in fact, the price tag of £320 for the course fees being one deterrent.  But it seemed a shame not to finally finish what I'd started, particularly as the Advanced levels are only run in alternate years.  

I'm finding it hard going: in fact after the first or second week, for the very first time I gave serious thought to dropping out, almost regretting my decision to re-enrol.  I struggle rather haltingly to contribute to oral discussions, I still cannot decipher recorded dialogue except by lucky guesswork, and the level of some of the reading texts we've been practising with has had some quite advanced vocabulary.  The interest level has varied and I daresay that's inevitable.  On the plus side, my reading is usually OK and I generally put the stress and intonation in the right places.  My grammatical work is on the whole spot-on, but I've yet to start either the first written assignment or prepare the presentation I have to do: I can't work up any real enthusiasm for either.  Somewhat unexpectedly, I was heartened to find at the end of this week's class, when we were talking amongst ourselves, that I'm by no means alone - I detected a noticeable feeling that this year's level is a big jump up from last year's and we wonder if the real problem is that we've just reached the natural ceiling of our ability?  Maybe I should confide discreetly in Laura, our tutor, who has always been both friendly and approachable?

But then as I sit here pondering upon the implications of that last paragraph I can suddenly hear echoing in the distant corners of my mind the plaintive, rather haunting cry of that poor lonely 17-year old from my past.  He's calling out to me :"Hey, Donny, you can do it!  Believe in yourself!  Don't give up on me now, you can do it, you know you can!"   I can't let him down a second time.                

Roads to Hell and other good intentions

Summer has turned into autumn - very noticeably and rather suddenly, I thought.  Lots of things I'd intended to do for one reason or another didn't materialize, keeping this blog up-to-date being one of them.  I won't bother making apologies or excuses, after all I'm quite a long way past the days of getting detentions for not handing my homework in on time!  Not that I actually ever did, just in case you were wondering: back then (as now) I got it down to a fine art doing the necessary the night before - and sometimes even that very morning.

I've written from time to time about my classes at the Uni learning Italian.  We'd been fortunate in keeping together as a group for the last three years - keeping the same timeslot and even meeting up almost every week informally during the long holidays.  Our luck was bound to run out eventually of course and this year there were not enough of us wanting to progress further with their studies to make our group viable any longer - the main catalyst being a change of time to an evening.  Not only that, the low numbers of enrolments generally this year has meant my having to skip a year and go up to the Advanced level!

For a while I toyed with the idea of swapping to doing French instead, for which there seemed to be a better variety of courses being offered.  Out of curiosity I did their 'test your level' thing (for intermediate to advanced) and found most of it surprisingly easy.  A few hesitations here and there meant I ran out of time right at the end, but on emailing them to get my result I found I'd got 67%.  Back in the days when I was doing my A levels I'd have been appalled to have got about a third wrong, but considering it had all lain pretty dormant for four decades, I felt not too shocked.

The upshot was that I found myself rather unintentionally being interviewed for a place on the Academic French course.  I'd expected to be able perhaps to manage a 'brush up your A level' type of thing but the tutor was so impressed by my ability to dredge up enough oral French to insist that I'd be suited to the top level (which equates to a 2-years post A-level!).  I was aghast at the prospect of this, and she compromised by suggesting I could drop a level if I found the going too tough.  Looking back on the encounter now, and writing about it, I wonder if it's perhaps just symptomatic of the grade inflation - a grade A (and an S grade 1) from 1966 equips you to go straight onto a modern second-year undergraduate level course?  Maybe if I'd kept up the practice more it would've done.  The clincher, though, was that it involved the study of a set text - something by Camus, I think.  I vaguely recollect dipping into "L'étranger" as background reading when I was doing my A levels, but I certainly didn't and don't feel disposed to embarking on the study of literature once again, given how much I hated it all the first time round.  Perhaps one day I'll find a way of taking up from where I left off 47 years ago, but I'm fairly certain that's not going to be it.

So, with some trepidation, I enrolled on the Advanced Italian course.  It's put me in mind of the time I was eight and was put up a year at Junior School - the logic I suppose being the same, that if you're at a high enough standard to start with and you have the innate ability (and perseverance) to catch up on what you've missed, then you maximise your potential.  It seemed a better idea than either repeating the year, which wasn't an option anyway, or waiting a year and probably losing the impetus.  So far so good: we'd pretty much already covered the bulk of the grammar anyway and widening your vocabulary is as much to do with reading and writing as actually going to classes.  By chance earlier this evening I came across something I'd written about three years ago when I was first starting - and spotted a couple of very obvious mistakes in it.  More to do with carelessness than not knowing what the correct version should've been, I daresay.  But I always find it's a huge step forward in learning a language when you find you're developing an innate 'feel' for when something looks wrong.               

D for dunce?

My Italian course finished for the Easter holidays the Friday before last.  It's an odd facet of the way the course is structured that you "pass" (and thereby qualify for progression to the next level up) at the end of this second term - with the third term consisting mainly of extra practice, consolidation and revision: you don't actually learn anything "new" as such.  Although you do have to attend all three terms to get the official course certificate.  Anyway, with that in view, I get an email yesterday from the tutor telling me I'd passed - the sting in the tail was that it was with a grade D!

I'm not exaggerating when I say I was gutted.  I'd got an 'A' last year and was naturally hoping for another this year, although I think I've mentioned at some point in my periodic ramblings on here that I've been finding the aural comprehension exercises very difficult.  So I wouldn't have been surprised at a 'B' on the basis of that.  That said, I may be, and probably am, attaching a negative significance to the grade which it doesn't actually have - it's not shown on the certificate or anywhere other than the email.  In fact none of our work is marked, so I don't even know how it's been arrived at or indeed what the possible grades are (A to E, like A levels perhaps?).  I'll have to try and find out from the tutor by next term: the email did say the extra third term would give me the opportunity to improve it.

The last time I got a D for anything was for mental arithmetic at Junior School, aged eight: coincidentally that was the Easter term, too.  I did also subsequently fail three O levels!  So there are precedents, and I guess it's just wounded pride I'm suffering from more than anything else.  Still, I daresay that's as good a motive as any to try and improve my performance?

Pause for reflection

Time to make New Years' Resolutions?  Probably so.  I haven't done any as such, because like most people I don't end up keeping them, but as I think one should at least make some sort of effort, I have made some tentative plans.  How they match up to the reality I'll maybe record on here as we go along.  I've got off to a good start with an entry for the first day of the year, at any rate. 

And so how was 2011?  It's going to stick in my mind forever of course as the year my sister died, but then I didn't have any control over that.  Of the things I did have a measure of control over, they went OK: not spectacularly well, but I avoided any major disasters.  I learned a bit more Italian, reminisced a little bit, and wrote a little bit.  I can't in all honesty say I achieved all that much, but then who can?  I can't pinpoint anything I did in 2011 that I've really since regretted, so I guess that's something of an achievement in itself.

As for 2012, I vouch for one thing only.  That this blog will be an Olympics-free zone!!

"Everyone's a winner, baby, that's the truth"

As at about roughly the same time last year, my Italian class this week took the form of a forty-five minute test.  When one of my classmates asked what the allocation of marks was, the tutor stunned us somewhat by claiming there wasn't one!  Apparently the purpose of the test is to show her how we're doing and how much of what she's taught us we've absorbed, but how she's going to be able to tell that apart from by actually "marking" the answers as right or wrong and/or "counting" the number of mistakes is something of a mystery.  It is of course increasingly unfashionable in educational circles to actually "fail" a pupil or student but even a simple grade serves the purpose of indicating whether you've done really well, or scraping through by the skin of your teeth.  But in a system which seems increasingly focussed on mediocrity, perhaps even that doesn't really matter much anymore.

There were four parts of the test.  The first was listening to a recorded passage of dialogue and picking out multiple choice answers for what the people were talking about.  That I really struggled with: the diction wasn't terribly clear, and they spoke fairly fast, so I was reduced to picking out recognizable words and hoping I'd guessed the context correctly.  So my answers were not much more than blind guesswork.

The second was an email from someone writing about their holiday, with some multiple-choice questions asking what they'd done and whether they'd enjoyed it or not.  Fairly straightforward with the odd unfamiliar word easy enough to guess from the context.

Number three was a grammar exercise filling in blanks by conjugating verbs correctly in the future tense.  We'd done that fairly recently, so I remembered how to do it - and not that many Italian verbs are irregular in the future tense anyway.

Finally a piece of composition based on a short scenario of having encountered a bag-snatcher in the park, and reporting said event to the police!   We had to use the passato prossimo (aka perfect tense) of at least ten out of a list of fifteen verbs, and having - I feel - rather done the perfect tense to death over the course of the last year, I managed to use all 15, although I "cheated" slightly by using a couple of imperfects, an infinitive and even a pluperfect or two!

We get the results on Friday!  Somehow or other, though, I think I've really got to get to grips with how to understand spoken dialogue better.

Like I've never been gone...

After a break of almost four months, I returned last week to this year's series of Italian classes.  I had, of course the best of intentions - doing a bit of practice and a bit of revision during the long summer holiday, but needless to say that never quite materialized and I returned with a definite feeling of apprehension that I'd have forgotten most of what I'd learned last year.  Surprisingly, I found I hadn't.  I won't say I slipped back into the routine effortlessly, but it all seemed surprisingly familiar and I found myself remembering more than I thought I would.  I was helped by the fact that this year's course doesn't just pick up from where last year's left off, the first couple of weeks anyway acting in the nature of a refresher - so yesterday we were practising the perfect tense.  I still find listening and understanding dialogue not the easiest of things to master, but I daresay that comes with practice.  Speaking is definitely coming with practice, and I think I may be at long last shedding my schoolboy reluctance to take part in oral lessons!

Anyway, the reward came yesterday in the form of a certificate for the successful completion of last year's studies.  I did in fact get a grade A, although the grade isn't shown on the certificate - perhaps everyone gets an A?  I must admit I wasn't expecting anything quite so formal and grandiose, almost worthy of a graduation ceremony, I thought.  I don't suppose I shall ever use it for anything, but 44 years after I made a first hesitant attempt at studying Italian, it's definitly nice to finally have something to show for it!    

When only the best will do.....

Unsurprisingly, this year's A-Level results have created an intense pressure for university places, before the fees go up next year. Although the proportion of pupils getting As or A*s, at 27%, is only slightly up from last year, as far as getting a place on the course of your choice is concerned I think you could be forgiven for thinking that anything less isn't worth the paper it's written on. At any rate, it's a far cry from the 1960s, when I took mine, and the top 27% would've included both As and Bs and the top 2% of Cs as well. And an overall pass rate of about 98%, I think has to raise questions about the validity of an exam which hardly anyone now fails.

Not that I'm knocking the achievements of this year's A level students. Thinking back, I remember two years of solid hard slog to get there, wondering at times whether it was all going to be worth it. Both French and German - the two subjects which gained me my As - have undergone a decline in popularity over the last decade, despite the fact that the students of today no longer have to sit through the interminable study of set texts which plagued me when I did mine.

As far as the question of "soft" options go, this is another question which yet again rears its ugly head. The then-new A level General Studies wasn't counted as worth anything by Universities, and so I didn't bother to take it, opting instead for a couple of now-defunct S-Levels. If subjects such as Media Studies are to be denigrated as not "proper" A-levels, then to my mind that is the fault of the examining boards for not devising a syllabus which is exacting enough, and the fault of the Universities for giving them a parity in the points allocation. Whatever happened to the proviso that you had to have a track record of excellence in the subject you were applying to study?

There again, the tendency of Universities to broaden the scope of degree offerings has contributed a lot to the 'Micky Mouse Degree' accusations. In 1980 I went to Polytechnic part-time for three years and got a BA in Librarianship. As a primarily 'vocational' qualification (which my employer declined to pay for, incidentally) it hardly rates alongside an Oxbridge Honours in Classics. But although it didn't bring me fame and fortune (or even an increase in salary) I'm kinda proud of my achievement. And in an educational system which seems these days to be increasingly focused on mediocrity, I guess that's reason enough.

End of Part One

My Italian classes came to an end on Friday - at least for this year. Having studied it before, I'd enrolled for the 'Post-Beginners' course, and after a moment of panic the first week when the other students recited from what I now realize was their (prepared) homework and I felt totally out of my depth, I in fact picked it up again really quickly and the tutor and my fellow-students seemed well impressed.

Looking back over the last year - well, nine months actually - one of the things that's really struck me was how much of my French surfaced again from my schooldays: sentence structures, grammar and vocabulary, long forgotten as I'd thought, suddenly reappearing as if it had been only yesterday. Probably a good thing, as the two languages are very similar and I must say I found it a useful clue on many occasions remembering back to how I was taught to say something in French and working from that to find the Italian equivalent instead of trying to "translate" direct from English.

Although I haven't *yet* got a qualification from it, the standard we've reached now from what I can make out is roughly equivalent to a basic GCSE. There's a series of higher-level courses, the first of which will be a 'Lower Intermediate' starting next year, and we're hoping to keep the same day/time slot which will be ideal for me, and nice too as the class has tended "gel" as a group. I've just got to keep practising over the long summer holiday so that I don't go and forget it all again!

Grade A student!

I was surprised (as I hadn't been keeping tabs on the dates, and Easter is some weeks off yet) to find that yesterday was the end-of-term on my Italian class. the previous week, we'd all had to do a "test" consisting of some aural exercises, a composition, some grammar exercises and a comprehension piece. We all, I think, found it more difficult than the previous term's one, but I was pleased to discover that despite a few very careless mistakes, I'd scored 61/67 or roughly 91%! That's slightly lower than the marks I used to get at school when I was studying languages, although I always used to reckon that anything over 90% was a reasonable enough performance.

I also got given a set of "competence statements" - something which is a cross between a certificate and a report card, with a list of 25 possible attainments out of which I managed 22. Those which are not ticked are:
-I can write a simple note or letter to a friend to accept an offer or invitation, thank someone or apologize
-I can fill in a questionnaire giving an account of my educational background, my job, my interests
-I can use the imperfect [tense]
Of those, I could in fact manage the first, as I've exchanged emails with people in Italian a couple of times on that sort of theme. The second I would probably struggle a bit with depending on the level of detail the "questionnaire" required. But the third is plain sailing: I learned how to use the imperfect tense (and the pluperfect as well) when I was learning Italian before and even after 45 years I haven't forgotten it - though I didn't really have occasion to use it when doing the various homework exercises we were set.
Anyway, the score was enough to earn me a Grade A pass and while I hope I'm not going to sound conceited when I say I'd have been disappointed with anything less, the fact that I've enjoyed doing it so much has definitely been the icing on the cake.

The next term starts in May, when we'll apparently be doing a lot more oral work!

A rose by any other name

Into December, and I'm now coming to the end of the first term in my Italian course. I sense that I'm doing pretty well: I'm enjoying it tremendously and picking up the grammatical concepts really quickly - or should I say refreshing my memory, as the deep-seated recollections of doing it some 45 years previously are coming back thick and fast now. The homework is falling into place too, as I'm regaining the intuitive ability to recognize when something looks right and sounds right. Having had as a schoolboy a definite aptitude as a linguist, it seems that it's something I evidently haven't lost.

Nonetheless, it was with some trepidation that I found out last week that today the tutor would be giving us a test - or a "progress check" as she hastily rephrased it. I did do some revision, or at least tried to fix more clearly some of the things which I'd been finding I'd mis-remembered (or which I possibly never learned the first time round). But it's not as if I were going to get a detention for not having paid attention properly in class!

The 'test' kicked off with a sort of aural/dictation test - listening to a recorded spoken passage and filling in the missing words in a transcript. I'd anticipated this as being the most difficult bit, because it's something I've been having trouble getting used to again - mainly I think due to the dialogue being played at normal conversation speed rather than being spoken deliberately slowly and clearly. But with filling in blanks, there's a surrounding context to give clues, which I've always found is a big help!

Onto the test proper: no looking things up in textbooks or dictionaries! Some grammar exercises (things like rewriting present tense as past tense) and then some comprehension exercises which consisted of four 'holiday postcards' and answering questions in Italian on which of the four holidaymakers had done what. A bit of intuitive guesswork with the vocabulary, but apart from my briefly wondering whether in a couple of instances there was more than one correct answer, it was otherwise fairly straightforward.

The big difference, I noticed, from the type of O level tests I'd done at school was the tendency to use multiple-choice answer format. With four possible answers to choose, blind guesswork will statistically score 25%, while eliminating those answers which are clearly and obviously wrong can easily improve that to a 50/50 chance. And that became even more apparent in the final set of questions which simply required a true/false answer to a statement. In fact the only time I did approach something of a total guess was in wondering if nuotare meant to swim, which I either didn't know or couldn't remember, but it seemed as if it might fit.

As far as I know we get the answers back next week. I shall be surprised if I haven't made the odd careless mistake or two: it's easy just to get a temporary mental block and give a wrong answer to something simple and basic which you actually know. But I reckon the grounding I got as a schoolboy linguist was a very solid one and I hope my old Masters at Leamington College for Boys would not be too disappointed with my efforts today.

Anarchy rules... OK?

I see from the news that Rentamob have featured heavily in the recent student protests against rising fees, and - inevitably - have left a trail of damage and destruction in their wake. It's harmed their case, in my view, because however jealously you regard the right to free speech and legitimate protest as being a fundamental cornerstone of a free democratic society, the right to go out to deliberately smash things up isn't, and reflects badly on those who do it.

I'm not unsymapthetic: I was a student myself once - more than once, in fact. At the age of 19 I travelled by bus and train from home to college in Birmingham every day for two years. I was lucky in that about two-thirds of my tuition fees were paid in the form of a grant (not a loan) from the Local Education Authority, but I ate my parents' food and used their electricity at their expense and subsisted off £1.50 a week which even in those days wasn't a lot of money. I didn't have the money to go out and get plastered on a regular basis, and they wouldn't have let me back in the house if I had.

Fast forward ten years, and I was working full-time with my own home - and with a mortgage and bills to pay. Doing a three-year part-time degree course was hard going and left little time for 'fun', but I thought it was worth it. I'd got my own motorbike, so getting to polytechnic on the outskirts of Birmingham once a week wasn't problematic. I can't remember how much the fees were, but since my employers decided that getting a (relevant, job-related) degree was for my benefit rather than theirs, they backtracked on a decision to pay for me to go, and I had to fork out the several hundred quid a year myself. So much for "investing in people", "workforce development", and all that claptrap. I did one night a week as a pools collector to raise the money - the old 'working your way through college' idea.

So yeah, being a student is no picnic. There again, there's no such thing as a free lunch - and there never has been.

Chalk and cheese?

When I was digging around recently, with a view to choosing a suitable course to further my study of Italian, one of the things which struck me was how diverse study opportunities have become over the years. When I took my A levels, it was with University in view, and it was the Careers Masters at school who were supposed to guide your choice of subjects to fit whatever ultimate aim or aspirations you had in mind. I remember the then-newish General Studies A level wasn't counted as a 'proper' one towards the required grades which an offer of a university place might specify.

Alternatively you could go to college - colloquially 'Tech' - to get qualifications in engineering, or 'Night School' for commerce and business studies, which I think were in many cases sponsored by employers. Colleges didn't in most cases run O levels or A levels apart from English or possibly Maths. But then as colleges became polytechnics and then Universities in their own right, and NVQs with their levels started being equated with GCSEs and A levels, quite a bewildering array of choice has built up, with in some cases students doing courses because they look interesting (or dare I say it, easy to get on) rather than with any particular employment prospects in mind.

I don't want to sound élitist, but one of the things I noticed when I was checking around was that a qualification such as a GCSE or A level was being equated to x hours of study. Even as a crude measure of the amount of work required to attain it, it's of very limited value: it's far too dependent on things like what the study actually consists of, how well information is used and retained, not to mention whether the student has any innate ability to start off with. It just seems to me to be in danger of becoming one of those 'lowest common denominator' things which seems to plague many aspects of modern education. I can't really see much point in offering a choice unless the options are significantly different. Or maybe I'm just old-fashioned?

Homework!

As part of the Italian course I started on Friday, I had some homework to do. It may seem a little incongruous to refer to "homework" in the context of a course at Uni, but given that it consisted of three pages of written exercises doing things like conjugating verbs and inserting articles correctly into sentences - much like I'd done when I was learning languages at school - it certainly felt like homework as I'd remembered it. I even did it the night before, as I always used to, though having to get up early enough in the morning to do a piece of biology homework due to be handed in that same day lurks distantly in my memory (and may well partially account for why I failed O level Biology!)

It took me about an hour and a half, which was a lot longer than I used to spend on my school homework, but then I'm very much out of practice, of course, and I had to spend quite a few minutes doing a bit of hasty revision from the course textbook which as luck would have it arrived in the post this morning. (Unlike when I was a pupil at school, this time I had to buy my own). But I plodded on and was quite heartened when I wrote one answer which I thought looked wrong, and when I checked again, found that it actually was wrong. Instinct can be a very good sign of innate ability, I've always found.

I don't know what the tutor's going to do with the answers: it's probably very 'politically incorrect' to mark homework nowadays - some wonky theory about it being more important to do the work than actually getting it right, I daresay. Pffft.

Practice, practice

This morning, I made a start on my new blog - written in Italian! Having started the course on Friday, if I'm to regain any sort of proficiency at all, I've got to practice in between lessons, and so I thought that a bit of writing - even if only a few words - is going to help. I struggled and had to look up quite a few simple words in a dictionary, as well as not remembering how you form the future tense, so I had to refresh my memory on that as well. However, considering the last time I wrote anything in Italian was forty-five years ago, I don't think I've done too badly. I deliberately kept it simple, and resisted the temptation to compose an entry in English and just translate it. No doubt it's more than just a bit stilted, and it's going to come across rather obviously as a first-form beginner practising tenses and simple nouns with articles - but hopefully it'll grow into something a bit more substantial as time goes on.

Back to skool school!

Maybe it's because I've been reminiscing an awful lot just lately, and maybe it's because the nights are really starting to draw in... but I started getting the vague feeling I ought to do something a bit more useful to occupy my time, and maybe even my brain cells as well. Without really thinking consciously about it, I started to feel drawn towards the idea of picking up the study of languages once again. Having already got A levels in French German and Latin, there seemed limited mileage in progressing any further there: I'd never really done much more than dabbled with either Spanish (which I'd done as a General Studies 'extra' for a term or two in the sixth form) or Portuguese (which I'd looked at many years ago on a BBC TV series which I don't even recollect getting to the end of). Which left Italian. In the two terms I'd spent briefly at Uni straight after leaving school, I'd got up to O level standard - or so I was told - but I'd got nothing to show for it, or at least not "officially".

So over the weekend I did a bit of ferreting around. I felt attracted to the idea of a proper class or course as giving perhaps more in the way of motivation than just doing something online - and found that Warwick University have a 'Post Beginners' course on Friday afternoons, which sounded just what I was looking for.

As this afternoon approached, I was looking forward to it - albeit with an odd butterfly or two - and once we got underway I was surprised how easily I slipped back into the old routine. It's been thirty-odd years since I did my degree, and another fifteen previous to that since I last studied Italian (or anything else full-time), but while I'd be exaggerating to say it all came flooding back, there was definitely more than just a trickle. And I certainly didn't feel anywhere near as self-conscious as I thought I might.

Benissimo!