Midterms

I think this probably qualifies as my first (and hopefully last, but I'm not holding my breath) hell week here in Taiwan. I have three exams this week, one of which I just completed today. This was just a lesson exam, covering the content of one lesson. Wednesday, we have the written portion of our midterm, and Thursday we have the spoken portion. Friday is a national holiday, so we have no class, and I would really be looking forward to it, were it not for the absolute mayhem I'll have to go through to get there.

Let me clarify. My teacher's exams are not easy. She's eased off a little since the first two in that she hasn't made us write a full essay, but even the fill-in-the-blanks and multiple choice parts are difficult. She doesn't just test us on content, she tests us on details and nuance, and in the same way that I respect her for doing it and am glad she pushes us to understand the finer points of the language, I also despise how hard I have to think about every single question, and how absolutely drained I feel at the end of the exams. I don't even want to think about how hard the midterm will be--I started studying for it last weekend, and I feel like I'm not even halfway prepared.

The spoken midterm is actually what's stressing me out the most, however. We have to put on a skit, the six of us in the class, using the vocabulary and grammar points we've studied. One of our previous speaking exams involved using the vocab and grammar points to tell a story, and that in itself was hard enough, just being one person and trying to come up with a coherent story using vocab that were often completely irrelevant to one another (think "Chinese comical dialogue" and "fruit juice"). Now, we have to use all the vocab, all the grammar points, and there are six of us. And, oh yeah, the only common language amongst us is Chinese, the language that we're here to learn. Yeah right.

Of course I'm exaggerating. To be honest, most of our Chinese is good enough that we don't have to worry about misunderstandings or missing something completely. We all get along well too, and that helps matters a great deal. We had a lot of good laughs trying to put together the main body of the skit earlier tonight, and tomorrow we're planning to go out to dinner together to go over the finer details of the thing before going home to practice.

I guess it's just a bit overwhelming to think that midterms are here already, that the term is halfway done. It feels like yesterday that I was moving in here, running all over the city trying to figure out apartments and tuition and banking and residency. And now it's midterms and then I'll be turning 23, and then it'll be the end of the term and some people will already be heading back to wherever they came from and new faces will come in to replace them.

Insanity. All of it.