Halftime
We hit the half-way point for the CELTA course yesterday, and I feel like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s a much better midpoint than last Sunday’s run, when I pretty much lost my will to live. Was the marathon only last Sunday? It’s amazing how quickly the pain goes away and you start convincing yourself that wasn’t so bad, I think I could do that again.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons women keep having natural childbirth. Selective memory isn’t such a bad thing, eh?
Last night, I was having drinks with a friend who did the same course about five years ago. I told her that I thought the worst was over and that the workload over the next couple weeks would be much more manageable. She just looked at me over her glass of white wine with an expression of, “ bless … you just keep thinking that, you naive little fool.” There was another person out last night who’d been through it and said “all I remember is that the month went by in a blur of sleep deprivation. My friends thought the authorities had finally caught up with me and taken me into custody.”
By most accounts (mine and my tutors') I’m a squidge ahead of the standard required to successfully finish, but not coasting by any means. And I’m good with that. I’m not trying to “just pass”, but I’m also stopping short of killing myself to be the “best in show.” There really is a threshold of diminishing returns on how much you do for this course. I’m not sure that I know where that threshold is, and I’m probably on the wrong side of it, but not too far past the mark. And at the end of the day, a B+ is really okay.
Of course, if anyone gets overall higher marks than me, I’ll have to kill them … but we’ll push them off that bridge when we come to it.
ESL