Waiting for the oral exam (boring) in French

Sue me, but I’m going to read my PowerPoint aloud. It will take about 7 minutes and 44 seconds, which is comfortably with in the 5-10 minute required range. There are 13 slides including the Ouvrages cités page. I have a cheat sheet with the numbers written down because I often freeze when confronted with saying long numbers aloud.

The instructor sent my final paper rough draft back and actually had a useful comment: that I was focusing on the problem of large banana plantations in Cameroun both as a hunger problem and as an economic problem, and it’s really more of an economic problem. She’s absolutely right; it’s a shame she didn’t give me her feedback more than 30 hours before my presentation, given that a lot of the 30 hours had to be devoted to work and sleep. I could spend the next 50 minutes tweaking my PowerPoint, I know, but right now, I’m just done. Finie!

Tomorrow, the revision of Paper #4 is due, but all she wants on that is for me to put dots in numbers instead of commas (2.900.000) and convert yards to meters. Monday, the paper version of my banana paper is due. She still hasn’t graded Paper #3, Exam #5, and some other homework.

Tomorrow, I don’t work; Saturday is the holiday open house, where I will wear the Mrs Santa suit and make the hot chocolate, and that seems to be all.

Edit: the presentation was fine. It was good I had the number cheat sheet. Not having done Pimsleur in my car for a couple months meant I wasn’t as good of a speaker as I usually am. I totally blanked out on a couple of easy words during the chitchat before and after the presentation. I turned in Paper #4, which was the one where I just had to reformat the numbers. My final paper isn’t due until Sunday, but I think I’m going to finish it off now and turn it in because I am just so tired of homework. Spring semester doesn’t start until January 13. I don’t know how the real students do it.