It’s hard to believe we have only one more class before the final. Just as we were starting to learn something, it’s over!
Seriously, it is time for a break. Nearly everyone seems exhausted. About ten people say they will be returning for Italian 2 in the fall. In fact, there is only one Italian 2 class on the fall schedule, and it is in this same time slot. Apparently, they are expecting us.
I don’t claim that this material is easy. But after all these weeks, why are there still so many people who just can’t get the homework right? (And don’t even get me started on the people who refuse to do the homework.) We do the homework at — you guessed it — home. Sometimes I do it in my car (parked outside Starbuck’s). The book is right there. We can look everything up, so memory failure is not an excuse. While the explanations in the book are not excellent, they are adequate for use with the rather lame exercises. And yet, when we go over the homework in class, person after person gets it wrong. If there are four ways to get it wrong, four people in a row will get it wrong. Some will even repeat the wrong answers already given. Certainly, getting an occasional wrong answer is no crime. Everyone does it. But what I see here is a huge lack of understanding. Many students just seem to be randomly guessing at the answers. They don’t understand what makes one answer right and another wrong, so they cannot learn from their mistakes, but are forced to guess randomly again the next time. It is a tedious process. I am so glad I am not a teacher.
Discussions with my fellow students reveal, again, that what is difficult for one is easy for another. Everybody’s brain is wired a little bit differently. I’ll mention something that I find very hard to understand, and someone else will jump in and say how easy it is if I just remember something that makes absolutely no sense to me, but clearly works for them. No doubt my view that certain things are simple or obvious surprises those who see them as strange and convoluted. To me, the word order in Italian seems confusingly different from English. Why is the verb over here and the noun over there? But to someone whose first language is Hebrew, English and Italian seem very similar. Some people have a very hard time learning the vocabulary. For me, recognizing the common (Latin) roots of words is very natural, so the meaning of new words is often fairly easy to see. On the other hand, those “little words” are still making me crazy. Yet some people seem to know almost instinctively what they are and where they go.
