So, today I 'sat' my evaluation test for entrance to my new Italian school in Melbourne. I say that like it's a formal thing, but it wasn't. In fact, I got to print it out and take it home. I suppose they expect grown adults, who are also teachers, not to cheat.
Cheat? I ask, as though the concept is totally foreign to me, and I've never accidentally used just a little too much of wikipedia in my essays. I'm a good girl I am - as if I'm going to cheat!
Actually, the sad reality is that I have a compulsion not to look stupid. If cheating makes me look less stupid, I will do it.
So I did.
Note to universe: I NEVER cheated when I was at school and only very rarely in university, and I always tell my students not to cheat else they feel my wrath. For the most part, I was pedantically well behaved at school, and couldn't even grasp how to cheat in the subjects I wasn't so brilliant in.
True story: whilst I would NEVER write the answers for trigonometry up and down my arms in high school as others did, I had no scruples not to for Fare and Essere on my very first DAY in Italy! And I got caught. AND looked completely stupid!!! So I guess it's a vicious circle that really can come back to bite you on the arse! But I tried, because I have only discovered my inferiority complex in the guise of la lingua di Italiano.
(Second note to universe: Ok, that's not quite true - but this blog is not about my inferiority complexes, so we'll just leave it at that and you can give me a hug or a cupcake later!)
The long and the short of it is that I literally spent hours on it. After the first page, which was pretty basic verbs, and then half a page of passato prossimo - which I'm pretty adept at now, thank you very much, and I can even remember the feminine essere and those irregular verbs that have TOTALLY different past tenses - it quickly entered a downward spiral of six pages of increasing torture! Moving hesitantly through definite articles, and then fare, before I knew it, I'd wizzed past imperfetto with a moderate degree of success and was gun toting with my old nemesis. You got it - four bloody pages of li, la, lo, gli blah bloody blah Pronomi. Even sitting on my couch, thousands of miles from feeling like a fool in Firenze, I had flashbacks to being a moron. Granted, this was a test - and I was always going to fail a lot of it, and that's what they want to test me on. But I have this sneaking suspicion that I simply failed the easy bits.
Or I would have! That's the beauty of cheating: between the dictionary on my phone, the dictionary on my computer (no, not google translator, cos it's cavoli), my actual dictionary and, well, google translator, three full notepads of notes from 6 weeks of studious behaviour in Firenze,and the help of my fluent Italian-speaking colleagues, I soon completed the eight pages perfectly.
I am the smartest girl alive!!!!
Epic fail, actually. It was only as I went to post it that I recognised the invevitable holes in my ingenious plan: based on this test, I'm now going to be put into Italian-Genius-level 101, and be stoned to death by Italian anyway.
Oops! Hey - I've never said I'm the smartest girl alive ALL the time!!
Now I can't resit the test because I have a very good memory for multiple choice, and I think I can remember all the answers. So I'm going to have to wait until I forget them. As I appear to have a talent for forgetting the very basics in Italian, I'm hoping that won't be too long - cos if this thing isn't in the mail within the next two days, I can't enrol anyway!!
Dear Santa/tooth-fairy/Jesus: please help me to forget Italian just long enough to be honest about how much I actually know. And then give it back, plus some, and make me fluent!
And while you're at it, kill particelle pronominali. Amen.
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