Ce n’est pas un blog post.

It’s the day of the French oral. I wait patiently in a small room, feeling confident. I am called into the examination chamber (I was going to just call it a room but chamber sounds nice and fancy) and, strangely, there are quite a few people in there. I am confused. I sit and the examiner starts talking to me in English.
“Talk in French! Why haven’t you put on the tape?” I cry.
“Shut up you,” she snaps back.
I make some feeble attempts at French conversation, she remains unresponsive. Eventually she turns to me and produces a packet of chewing gum from her pocket.
“Fine then. If you’re so smart, describe this chewing gum to me!”
I panic, I do not know the French word for chewing gum. Why is she doing this to me?
She puts on the tape, but music starts coming out. She starts dancing and singing along. She throws a book at me.
“Read that,” she spits.
I start to cry. My English teacher enters the room and sings at me as tears roll down my face.

I wake up whimpering and shaking my head feverishly, frozen for a few moments in utter terror. Then I realised it was only a dream, I had not just screwed up my oral over a description of chewing gum. What relief!

Thankfully, I’m not terribly worried about my French oral. The Irish oral is a different kettle of fish, however. I have an excellent Irish teacher who in her spare time must also be the totalitarian dictator of a small country as she controls every aspect of our Irish-speaking lives, including our oral material. She’s basically given us everything we know in the form of notes and handouts and while this is totally awesome in terms of the quality of the Irish and it all looks beautiful written down, not much of it is in my head. I have around two weeks to get it in there though, and some of the questions I KNOW we won’t be asked (the sheet of questions she gave us must be from 20 years ago…Example: What do you think of the situation in Ulster? She made us learn an answer to it, in the future tense. There will be peace etc etc. WTF?)

I received a letter from Trinity a while back containing a questionnaire for the English and Drama Studies course, which I filled out hurriedly and horribly while trying to prepare for History grinds and which has more tip-ex on it than actual ink. However, it seems they didn’t mind that or the hopelessly contrived answers as I now have to go to an interview/workshop thing on the 20th April. Woo, go me!
Except not really. That week happens to be the week of my Irish oral and Music practical. Yeah. I don’t know if all schools do their orals/practicals at the same time, but gosh Trinners! How am I going to work that out at all – as the French say, on verra…

I must get going and do some study. Grrr.

Valerie

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