Mid-Term Russian Update

Mom asked me how my Russian class was going so I thought that I would give an update. I've been in class for about 5 weeks now and things are going well. The class is not nearly as structured as I had hoped it would be and really isn't very demanding. There are only 4 of us total enrolled in the course: a married couple, myself and a high school student. The teacher is a recent college graduate with a degree in Geography (huh?) who is incidentally fluent in both Russian and Italian.

The first several weeks of class I was way ahead of everyone else since I was already familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet. Even though it wasn't totally new material it was still fun to be in a class and to practice reading and speaking Russian.

I'm afraid, however, that the ease of the class made me a little complacent. At the end of our fourth class we had a quiz on the vocabulary that we had been assigned at the beginning of the first class. I assumed that we were going to just be covering the words that we had talked about so far in class and so I didn't really study. Even though I did as well (or better) than anyone else in the class I was embarrassed that I had to leave so many questions unanswered. I didn't realize that we were being quizzed on the entire vocabulary list and not just the words that we had covered in class.

I'm not one of those people that obsesses about being the best student in class but I don't like to get caught unprepared for something that I should know. So, I went home after class and typed up all 150 vocabulary words on flash cards and then proceeded to memorize every single one of them for my next class.

Of course, the way that life works you often don't get the chance to make up for an occasion like that. The most likely outcome would be that I would go to class the following week and that we would not be quizzed on those same words again. Sure, I imagined being able to rattle off each and every one of those 160 words that I had studied when challenged by the teacher. But would that really happen in real life?

It turns out that I got exactly that opportunity. Only it didn't make me feel as good as I had hoped. We ended up with some spare time at the end of our last class and the teacher decided to quiz us on some vocabulary words. In response to the first couple of words I blurted out the answer almost before the teacher had finished saying them.

After that I figured that I had made my point and had vindicated myself from the previous weeks lackluster performance. I decided to let some of the other students answer the next couple of words. The only problem was that the other students didn't seem to know any of the answer. After a couple seconds of dead silence I began to fear that the teacher would assume that I wasn't answering because I also did not know the answer.

And so, unable to bear the silence in the classroom any longer, one word after another, I blurted out the answer. It got to where I was embarrassing myself. I felt like I was being a showboat, but I just couldn't seem to stop myself from spitting out the answers. I had, after all, studied so hard to learn each and every one of them. At one point, the teacher even allowed the other students to use their printed list of words to cheat... and they still couldn't answer fast enough.

I left class that night feeling bad about my episode. I'm sure that all of the other students in class hated me. I even apologized to the teacher on the way out (although she didn't seem concerned or even realize that there was cause for concern).