Yes, the time has come to put away my Ancient Greek books and face the dreaded examination. It's on Wednesday morning and will be three hours long. It's my second Greek exam, being the finale of my second year of Greek with the Open University, and this year consists of prepared passages from Plato's Symposium (for comprehension and essays), an unseen translation, and the most appalling thing anyone doing this subject could ever imagine: a dastardly Ancient Greek grammar section, which should take about 45 minutes to complete.
You'll forgive me, then, if this post is a little short, but I have only a day and a half left for revision, and still haven't covered the Middle and Passive, nor have I even so much as glanced at noun declensions.
Silent scream!
N.B. For those interested in such things, here's a link to my rather irregular blog on studying Ancient Greek.
5 comments:
E'khe tu'khe agathe'!
All the best with this Jane - I'll be thinking of you
Angela
Thanks, folks. I'm looking forward to reading Greek - in months to come - without this pain in my stomach called 'examination stress'.
I've actually really enjoyed reading Plato's Symposium in Greek. I just don't enjoy the idea of being asked to comment on or translate large chunks of it tomorrow without my trusty dictionary or grammar books to hand ...
Blearh.
Jx
Hope it went well!
I'm really kicking myself about the exam now, which I took this morning. Trying to shrug it off but my head's buzzing, as you'd expect.
I arrived late, in spite of leaving two hours to make the usually 50 minute trip into Birmingham centre - traffic was appalling! - so was flustered and stressed, and couldn't get into my stride after that.
I missed some very simple things, early on, like not spotting a genitive absolute, making a common feminine noun masculine, and later on, in the Unseen Translation, making the same mistake TWICE by not recognising a fairly obvious imperative! And those are just the mistakes I was aware of, walking away from the examination ...
Overall, I think I scraped a pass, which is 40%. Doesn't sound like much but the paper was very tough indeed, with a tricky main essay topic which I hadn't thought to cover in revision. After battling with that, I left it very late to begin the Unseen, which meant I didn't have time to write a rough draft but had to write down the first things that came into my head. Even doing that, I still only wrote the last sentence with about thirty seconds to go!
I pity that poor examiner. What a messy, slipshod paper to have to trawl through ...
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