I failed something very important this week

I failed something very important this week. I failed my spoken final for Spanish 105, and it's 10% of my grade. Why I'm choosing to publish this as a blog is beyond me, other than the fact that I'm hoping somehow to make sense of what happened. The final consisted of two parts. A one-on-one interview with the professor, and a role play activity with another student. There is no one else in the room, just the teacher and the students taking the test. I sat down, looked at my professor, and my mind went blank. I couldn't even return his greeting which, any person off the street with absolutely no experience in the language could have greeted back. I felt like a deer in the headlights, and after three questions, he stopped the test and asked if he should go on. All I could do was stare at him, hands over my mouth, and see nothing in my head but a blinding light. No words, no thoughts, no emotions, nothing. When I didn't respond to him, he called my name and snapped me out of whatever trance I had fallen into. He said he didn't even know how to grade me, and my response, which will haunt me forever was "just fail me".  And, he did.  I didn't leave him much choice.  I regret saying this, but it was so guttural and instinctual, that I could hardly even speak the phrase clearly.    

 He asked me to compose my face so that I didn't scare the confidence out of the rest of my classmates. Wow, that was a first for me.

 So, here I sit, writing a blog about it and trying to figure out why I failed so utterly. Usually I can muster some type of response, or a verb or two, but I couldn't even think in English, let alone translate something into Spanish. I was aware of my surroundings, I saw the look on his face when he realized this was not going to go well, and I saw the look of disappointment (or disgust?) on his face when I gave up. Yet, only now, am I able to have some type of reaction to the whole thing, and luckily I'm the only one here to see the meltdown. I don't feel any better, in fact I feel worse because I can actually feel the emotions now.

I know we all fail at things in our lives, and we hope for the best when these things do happen. I had some inkling that the oral final was not going to go well early on in the semester. I found that I could hear the words volume-wise, but for the life of me, I couldn't comprehend what they were. They were nothing more than noise with no meaning to me. It doesn't help I have hearing issues, but as I've been able to understand English, albeit with several repeats sometimes, I assumed I could do the same with Spanish. Well, on the oral comprehension test, no. Repeats lower your grade. There was a good chance I would have failed this test anyway because I would have had to ask for repeats. So, I thought maybe he could spell, in Spanish of course, some of the words I couldn't understand. But, when it came down to it, I didn't understand the sentence to even be able to ask what words to spell. I'm not sure what grade I got on the role play, but with the interview at 40% of the overall grade I would have had to score a perfect grade to even get a D. And there is no way I scored a perfect grade. I can still do math, and that adds up to a big, fat F.

 So, now what? I have the written composition and the written final left. In my heart, I believe I will pass this course, hopefully, but I need to ace both. The composition was handed in earlier in the week, but I worked really hard on it, took all the feedback into consideration and changed a lot of what I had written, and I hope that it will at the very least, cancel the oral final out. They are both worth 10% of my grade.

 I really am not coming up with any answers for what happened other than panic and anxiety. And, I'm really tired of those two excuses. I want the old me back, where I could take a test without this drama and nonsense. If this is what my future is going to bring, yeah, it's a bright light alright. One that obliterates my memory only long enough for me to fail and then leave me with the scorching memory of that instead of the answers. I now question if that's what I really want out of school.