Firstly I must explain the previous post. As you may have gathered, my second rabbit died that day. I miss her so much. We are not having any more pets, so I will remain rabbitless for the rest of my years at home. But I can assure you, as soon as I move away and get my own place, I will get more rabbits. I suppose it is an incentive to work hard, to ensure I can afford a rabbit and a garden to put it in.
I have also had a little look at my end of year report. This is where the title of this post comes in. Many of you may know, that I have been really struggling with Latin. For some ridiculous reason, unknown to me, I chose to take it for GCSE. In my defence, I wasn't struggling last year. However, I was only comparing myself to the rest of my class at the time, and when I turned up at my first Latin lesson of Year 10, I was in for a big shock. I may have been finding it ok in my old class, but I had never been taught by Mrs Giddings. As soon as I started GCSE Latin, I realised what an amazing teacher she is, and how much Latin I had missed out on, when being taught by the other Latin teachers. I noticed a clear division within the class. There were those who were finding Latin ok, whether it was because they had been taught by Mrs Giddings before or because they are pure genii, such as my friends Sophie and Becca. Then there was me. I couldn't understand any of it. We had never been told to recite any verb or noun endings and I have always struggled with the vocabulary. We hadn't translated half the passages in the previous text books and so I found there were huge gaps in my knowledge of Salvius and the other characters that keep reappearing. Things hadn't gone too well in the first term, and in my interim report, I was given a B as my "very optimistic target grade". Many of you would say that isn't too bad at all, in a way it isn't. But I knew that Mrs Giddings had only given me that, so as not to dishearten me too much. Really I should have had a much lower grade.
Despite this, I worked, and worked and worked. I still wasn't very confident, but I started noticing that I could get through more translations without checking the back of the book. I had set myself 10 words to learn each day, and I chanted my nouns and verbs on my walk to school, which really helped, because my walking pace helped keep rhythm. My test results still weren't brilliant. I was getting 60% maybe 70%, whereas my classmates would get over 90%. But as time went on, I improved. I was pleasantly surprised with my end of year exam. I found the first paper reasonable and got 55/60. I was really pleased with this. Although I struggled with the second paper, my overall percentage was only a few percent below the median, which is pretty good considering it's Kendrick.
I know there is still a lot more work to do, but I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel. I am now predicted an A in Latin. And I can see, that if I continue to work as hard as I have been, that grade may be pushed up to an A* by the end of next year.
And here is an even more positive note. You may consider me a bit of a geek, and to be honest, I can't deny it. But all it is hard work, and I don't sacrifice my free time to work hard, I just use my time wisely. But the hard work pays off. In my report, I am predicted 9 A*s and an A (which is Latin).
Tomorrow is this lovely day called profiling day. This involves going in for the day, and spending 20 minutes talking to your form tutor about your report before joining your classmates in off timetable activities such as a cheer-leading course. I have Tuesday off school, while the second half of the register have their profiling day. And Wednesday is this life saving word called INSET! So there won't be much work to do this week, which gives me plenty of time to fret about my DofE expedition next weekend.
