Assignment woes

This sucks.  It totally sucks.  It sucks big time.  It’s one of the suckiest things I’ve experienced this year.  Not quite as sucky as some of the suckiest things I experienced last year, but it still totally sucks.

There’s nothing quite like having something you’re usually good at used to highlight just how crap you truly are.

I’ve been given two writing tasks for my German assignment.  One is to write a “travel blog” about a place in a German speaking country.  Easily enough done (if not easy to do well).  I have plenty to say about the place of my choice.  The actual mechanics of saying it are a challenge, but that’s why we have assignments, right?  Heck, I’m already over the word limit on that one (but I’ve decided I don’t care).

The second task is to write typical classroom assignment twaddle.  The question is:  “In education a person should be viewed holistically, one should not just focus on results”.  It’s twaddle.  It’s one of those silly twaddly things that just try to get you to prove you can write a reasoned argument in a proper paragraph structure.  It barely means anything.

This is just the sort of thing I can do with my eyes closed in English.  I can churn out twaddle like the best of them.  The trouble is that I make up for the lack of meaningful things to say by falling back onto rhetoric.  I use metaphors, similes, carefully crafted redundancies, the occasional hyperbole and the odd synecdoche.  All of these are very idiomatic and language specific.  A perfectly legitimate synecdoche in English is complete nonsense in another language.  I can crank out the meaningless twaddle, but I can’t translate it.

And, when I try to pare down to sentences that are simple and straightforward and can be translated across, I realise I have nothing to say.  Try as hard as I might, every time I feel like I’ve got the wind of inspiration and can burst into something vaguely resembling eloquence, I realise I’ve come up with a sentence like the one I’ve just written.  “Try as hard as I might”?  Idiom.  “Wind of inspiration”?  Metaphor.  “Burst into something vaguely resembling eloquence”?  I just don’t know how to translate that - or even if I should.

I “write up” for frippy little tasks like these.  I can churn out three sentences to encapsulate one flimsy idea.  But to translate into another language I have to pare back.  I can’t write up and pare back at the same time.  It’s doing my head in.

And, in the back of my mind, a simple truth keeps raising its ugly head:  “It’s only because you don’t know enough.  If you a) knew what you were talking about, and b) paid attention to the things you should have learnt, there wouldn’t be a problem.”

There's nothing like trying to do an assignment in another language to give you a new appreciation for what NESB students go through in English speaking universities.

It turns out everything we expect from them is kind of unreasonable and cruel.  All lecturers and teachers should try walking a mile in their shoes before attempting to mark them.