Oral Woes

No, I don't need a trip to the dentist. Well I do but my dentist has left the practice, and has yet to be replaced and don't start me on why I am therefore paying a monthly fee to them, because I don't know especially since I am due a hygiene appointment, and probably by now a check up, not to mention that the pinned filling has crumbled once again -

But this is not what I came here to talk about. What I came here to talk about was next Monday, because next Monday sees the oral assessment for Part 1 of my Gaelic course and I am terrified.

 

I have always had problems with oral exams, because I belong to a personality type that a) hates getting things wrong and b) hates being observed while doing stuff, especially if getting it wrong. This largely accounts, I think,  for my failure ever to pass a driving test, despite many lessons, several attempts and being told by my instructor that I was a perfectly good driver.

 

It wasn't too bad at school, because we were drilled relentlessly before our O and A level oral exams; what to expect, what to try and get in to impress, and in any case they were done by strangers who you would never see again. There was no emotional investment, other than the immediate desire for them to give you a  good mark, in the people conducting the test. And additionally I knew that as far as French and German went my accent was good. So I was nervous, but not more so than anyone else. Not more so than was reasonable.

 

The rot set in at University where oral exams were conducted by people who taught you the rest of the time, and who you really really wanted to please.  My Russian accent was not particularly good, nor was I confident in my grammar or vocabulary. The format was different, in that you had to not only hold your own in a conversation, where you might be asked a question you didn't understand, at which point, obviously the world would end, but you also had to read a previously unseen piece of Russian, where naturally they didn't mark the stresses on unfamiliar words, and do a short presentation. Given that a presentation is basically a spoken essay and given that my Russian essays generally lacked something; accuracy mostly, I was never confident of that part either. Oral exams made me ill, literally. By my final year I was allowed always to go first, rather than in my correct alphabetic order, which would normally have seen me not examined until the afternoon, and I was also allowed, in defiance of the general No Food or Drink regulation, to take a large glass of milk into the examination with me. Milk was the one thing known to stop me vomiting over the examiners shoes.

 

After graduation oral exams became a thing of the past, except for a little mild role play when I was learning Norwegian which had to be recorded for 'quality control purposes'. But now the dreaded oral is once again looming large. I am dreading it because:-

 

I am not very confident of my accent/ability to understand the questions put to me/ ability to ask questions back (for which you get extra marks)

 

I am straight after the class star and will doubtless suffer by comparison with her confidence and fluency.

 

I will be preparing as thoroughly as I can, but I have at the same time to prepare new material for the normal class on Monday morning. We have a visitor who we will be taking out all day Sunday, and the first chapter of my Ph D thesis is due in around about now, and a) its not quite finished and b) I haven't yet done any of the referencing.  This is not to say that I haven't been working hard on it. The recent trips south were all about research in the National Library, and they were enjoyable and useful and everything that research at its best is. But they exhausted me which put a bit of a brake on stuff and really trying to do that and keep up with the Gaelic and keep on top of the laundry and make the occasional attempt to keep the house clean and tidy, it's all been a bit much. 

 

Light and tunnel though; the chapter is almost finished, at least next Monday gets the oral out of the way, the course itself finishes in the second week of June and then we're going away. Not the blackest of black nights then, but I'll be a happier bunny come three o' clock next Monday when it will all be over.