This post is boring
Tuesday was critical and culture theory and romance. I answered on Foucault's docile body and Lacan's structuralist/poststructuralist restructuring of Freud's work. I think I answered both of those well, hardly anything groundbreaking but schmeh, we'll see how it all goes down. My romance question was a mess. Oh dear lord. I made the most dreadful mistake I've ever made in an exam, and I mixed up homogeneous and heterogeneous in leaving cert chemistry and only realised my mistake after the exam finished. And that was the third question I answered. And I had half an hour or so to review my paper. ANYWAY, moving on. I revised the Franklin's Tale until I knew it inside out and had plenty to say about prostitution, the relation of money to gentillesse, working class heroism a-blah-blah-blah. The question that came up was the place of money in romance - BRILLIANT - but they didn't specify a text so I, like a common fool, thought 'oh no, better not touch that, I only know the Franklin's tale in relation to money'. If I'd bothered to use my mental faculties at all I might have wrangled something about Malory, Chretien or another Chaucer tale in. But no, like a common fool I answered on the place of the female in romance, like everyone else did, and said nothing that would set me apart from everybody else, apart from the bit about prostitution which I managed to slip in. Sure, I brought up Orfeo, three Chaucer tales, Malory and Chretien but I barely skimmed their surfaces and I'm certain I would have done better writing about just the Franklin. Well, I guess these thing happen and we move on. Overall, that question is worth 1/18 of my schols mark so even if I got 50 it ain't so bad.
I guess my main problem with that paper was that for some reason other people's stress about 'writing enough' rubbed off on me, so instead of focusing on writing a well-structured, coherent, interesting, well-referenced and somewhat original answer like I usually do, I thought about filling the booklet. Oddly enough, today when I was worrying about quality instead and took time to plan my answers properly, I ended up writing more.
Thursday we had social psychology. It went well; because I didn't arse myself predicting off other years and studied what I found most interesting; because I showed up at lectures and got an inkling of what the lecturer liked; because I actively went and got recommended readings she had photocopied for us, the paper wasn't a surprise and was actually quite nice. I've only ever sat one other psychology essay paper, though, so I'm not sure what's expected of us. Still, I think I did alright.
Oh today, today I was so happy. I met Tim for coffee on the way home from library time and he said that I seemed so much less stressed than I did before, and I didn't even know the pressure was showing! Junior Fresh English, there were four courses on the paper but I only had to answer on three. I wrote about the family in Irish lit (McGahern and Bowen), representations of revolution in romanticism (Clare and Godwin) and erotic experience (The Fox/D.H. Lawrence). I actually had fun writing that Fox question, like the loser I am.
If you asked me to estimate a mark, I full on couldn't do so. I'd say I must be above 60 somewhere, and hopefully above 70 but I haven't a clue. Could be 55, could be 75. That's what I hate about essay exams; although you'll always be able to twist them around and put your knowledge on the page in one form or another, it's hard to call just how right or wrong you were, and whether you got enough facts down on the page.
In other news, I'm frustrated at exams occuring during brain awareness week. BAH. Career-relevance and genuine interest FOILED by schols.
I promise I'll be back in full swing with tales of my interesting life once schols is over. 'Cause I promised myself to make my life interesting when the stress of exams is off my plate.