Monday, December 15, 2008

Misc.

BIG NEW OF THE DAY: Eldest P.A.S.S.E.D. Castillian!!!!! 50%, but a PASS!!!!!!!!

We are very very happy.

She is being graded just as hard as the other kids, most of whom are native speakers. This is a considerable achievement.

Good going kid.

Now, MATH!

OMG.

The test is the day my parents arrive, and as she has officially failed the term and this is the last ditch chance to pass, we have been studying like MAD....may I add, that I am learning things that they never ever taught when I was a girl....it is making it a challenge finding time to get ready...and to study Catalan...but what the heck, it'll all get done in the end. As long as she passes the darn thing.

My firefox is doing something a little weird. This screen popped up, and every time I move the mouse over it, I was painting....It is pretty cool...and quite mystifying.

Look what I did:

On another topic, can I just say something about getting older? It is weird. I was hot, then cold, then sweaty hot, then cold all day. Like an egg timer every half hour; and my eyebrows? I swear they are thining, though maybe I am just getting a complex here. This is not a common problem in Spain.

I read a casual and humorous list of parenting tips in a book last night, one of them we seem to be doing right. I'll share. "When parenting a teenager, be sure you have a dog. Then there will always be someone who is happy you came home."

Check.

I am going to have to write a practice test for eldest to do tomorrow night. Fortunately I'll be at work when she has to do it!!!

Sweet!

8 comments:

oreneta said...

Whew! It's all bold?!?! What happened there I wonder.

mmichele said...

Well, you are obviously very excited! The Catalan test was great news.

kate said...

Yes, great news. And good luck on the math! What are they studying in Castillian? I'm assuming that in her school it's treated as a "foreign language" and Catalan is the vehicular language.

Anyway, hang in there, it's almost over (for a while, anyway!)

Angel said...

YAYAYAY for Eldest!!!! but math? do you REALLY need math? I think it's a waste. as long as you can read gossip magazines, you're set.

nad getting older sucks. I plucked THREE WHITE hairs in my eyebrows yesterday. WTH???!

Hula Girl at Heart said...

Congratulations to daughter for passing! And good luck with the math. Glad I'm not the one having to study.

Anonymous said...

Congrats - she must be on top of the world about that!
I'll keep my fingers crossed for the maths. GM

oreneta said...

Mmichele...at least blogger thinks I am all excited anyway.

Kate, yes, Castillian is treated as a foreign language, sort of. They don't teach them the language the way they do English...they teach them linguistics honestly....it is totally weird. The books, Jane Eyre, I have a student who has to give a presentation on English Romantic poets...Byron and Keats(?) I can't remember. Totally totally weird. Eldest is reading Poe and just finished a Sherlock Holmes. I wonder if it is subtle (or not so subtle) anti-Spanish/Spain stuff. What do they study in high school in Madrid for Castillian? The Catalan books, not English authors by and large, but I think many are Spanish and translated....

Beth...I think I have a post about getting older coming up. One of these days I'll get annoyed enough and let it rip....math...yeah, in a lot of ways, I'm with you....fractions? meh...convert it to a decimal and go from there....

Hula, ironically she knows the crap. She was explaining it to me faster than I could figure it out (from Catalan and memory. Fractions in Catalan *shudder*) A lot of why she is doing so badly is sloppiness. She is writing messily and guessing on calculation answers...that doesn't seem enough though.

Gm...keep them crossed please....

kate said...

I was just trying to find the national base curriculum for Language and Castillian Literature in ESO (which is pretty basic, so each region can flesh it out any way they want to)and from what I've seen, it appears that the common objectives relate to different kinds of literay and other texts, but it never mentions specific literary works or even says specifically which language the works should be in. I would wager, though, that in Madrid and probably most of Spain kids are reading actual Spanish literature, though it's likely that they also read other stuff in translation.