So I took this big French exam yesterday – the DELF (Diplôme d’Études en Langue Française). If I pass (I wrote the level B2 exam) I will be “officially” bilingual – I will be able to attend any French University, or get a job in France without having to write a French competency test. (Yeah, like either of those two things is going to happen!)
Before I go any further, let me just say that I’m pretty sure I did pass. So: phew. As to why I did it, it’s a bit of a long (and boring) story, but suffice to say that it’s one of a string of professional development qualifications I’m working on.
But man: it was rough going. I am so not used to being in student mode, and did it ever show.
The old me, aka the young me, the kid in her teens and 20s who breezed through high school and university on lots of beer and little sleep would have probably pulled an all-nighter trying to memorize every possible conjugation of all irregular verbs in the subjunctive mood, and would have somehow managed to pull off a grade of 85%.
But on Monday night, all I did was relax and go to bed early. I figured my French was as good as it was going to get, and a refreshed brain would serve me better in the exam on Tuesday than any last-minute cramming would. The young me would have thought, who IS that cream-puff?
Then I woke up at 2:00 a.m. with an excruciatingly painful charlie horse in my neck and right shoulder. I had to get up and take some Aleve, in hopes that I might be able to get back to sleep again. I wasn’t able to really sleep much between then and my alarm at 7:00 a.m., and by the time I got out of bed I could barely turn my head 5 degrees in either direction. GREAT. Luckily the liberal application of heat and consumption of naproxen sodium loosened it up enough that I was able to move my head enough to drive to the exam and look down on the paper for the 2.5 hours we were given to write the written component. At least if I had stayed up all night memorizing French verbs I wouldn’t have been physically handicapped and under the influence of powerful over-the-counter drugs!
And then there was the time factor: three of the six of us who wrote the exam were high school students, who easily finished in just over an hour and whizzed out of the room early. That so would have been me back in the day. I was famous for it – in University I always finished exams early and went to get a coffee and muffin while I waited for my friends to finish so we could debrief and rehash and compare notes on how we’d done. But not yesterday. No, yesterday I wrung every second they gave me in that exam, willing my brain to work faster and slightly freaking out that I would run out of time. And I re-read every single answer about five times. Which I never used to do – in fact, I used to think it was bad luck to check my answers, feeling that I was safer going with my “first instinct” in every case.
And the relief I felt after it was all over – 2.5 hours of written exam and 50 minutes of oral exam – it wasn’t the exhilarated relief of my student days, but rather a dog-tired, resigned relief. I didn’t care about my mark, and for the first time in my life I actually believed the words, “as long as I pass” when I said them. Truly – I don’t care if I was the best or the fastest student there, or if I got the highest mark (I used to). All I care is that I get the 50% I need to pass.
Man, I am so old.
My mother started university the same year that I did. One summer, we took a Children’s Literature course together. I treated it as the bird course I was looking for, and made fun of my mother for the entire six weeks because she took it so seriously, keeping up with her reading, stressing about tests, going to every class, and staying late to talk to the teacher. I think in the end I got a higher grade, but I realize twenty years later that she got a lot more out of that class. Something tells me that if I went back to university today I’d be a lot more like my mother as a student.
BTW, Felicitations!
My mother started university the same year that I did. One summer, we took a Children’s Literature course together. I treated it as the bird course I was looking for, and made fun of my mother for the entire six weeks because she took it so seriously, keeping up with her reading, stressing about tests, going to every class, and staying late to talk to the teacher. I think in the end I got a higher grade, but I realize twenty years later that she got a lot more out of that class. Something tells me that if I went back to university today I’d be a lot more like my mother as a student.
BTW, Feliciations!