I´m very happy to have completed my first week of oral exams with three straight B´s...2,0 three times! Considering that my fields of interest are still coming up (or as it was the case with textual linguistics, had to balance out my C-grade in historical linguistics) this is pretty sweet! I´ve been getting some climbing as well and considering that I went to Arco, climbed a lot, biked a lot, hiked a lot (aka lived!) instead of just morphing into a total book worm this actually came as a surprise at times...but hey, that´s my approach! In my opinion, exams are knowledge, admitted, but also to a large extend about the right state of mind. Since I´ve learned over the years that I can take in A LOT of information in a very short time, I trust that approach. To make it work though, my mind needs to be calm, ready and focused. In that sense, to some going bouldering a day before an exam might seem verging on the brink of academic suicide, to me it´s preperation. It´s actually pretty rad if you can prep that way...
Textual linguistics/historical linguistics kicked the week off with a good exam about texts as communicative acts, pragmatics, semantics and pretty much what I´m interested in. To my surprise, I got a mail asking for my historical linguistics literature list the morning of the exam...which was the moment I found out I had to at first deliver such a thing and then know pretty much about it as well. Well, let´s say that I made coffee, realized that I had about 4 hours left and started reading! Well, fortunately I was able to get away with semantic change from Medieval German to Present German (luckily my professor´s field of study, so she agreed) and since I´ve always been treading the border of linguistics, communication studies in general and the semantics/pragmatics interface, I knew something...I only had to refresh my memory. Turns out it worked.
Since I won´t ever run into my Medieval German Literature professor again, I´m safe to say that I wasn´t expecting too much after the girl examined before me totally crashed, left the room almost crying and told me that guy was a bastard. I do wholeheartedly agree! I have met a couple of seriously ego inflated narcists way too pleased with themselves but this one topped it all. Not only was the exam lacking a clear structure, he also chose to quote Goethe and others at random just to show how smart he was (at no time related to anything halfway exam relevant), cracked some pretty stupid jokes and was mightly pleased with himself, to a point that made it close to creepy. Anyway, to my surprise, I got another straight B! I guess I owe this to my Salinger thesis, when I was asked if there are prologue like structures in modern literature, I came up with the theory that Salinger´s "The catcher in the rye" actually starts like one...It does. I checked it. He was PLEASED! So was I leaving the room...
To round it of, yesterday`s pedagogics was fun. I liked the topic, the examiner and the whole thing. Went climbing afterwards...added two more sweet projects to my list and climbed well, especially considering that I had had a crappy night with almost no sleep...I hate it when a system moves in, it ruins my sleep!
Out for more exam prep and then some bouldering/climbing! YAY!
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