Day 24: Grammar

24 septembre 2009 (Day 24)
Ah, there is nothing like waking up early for an appointment…with the laundry room. Before the sun had risen I had stuffed a significant amount of laundry into the itty bitty washing machine. My morning continued to be leisurely as I was on my computer, read, did yoga, and ate. Eating was quite the adventure, as the kitchen was locked. There was a sign that said why it was locked. I thought this sign said, “Closed due to water fight” (I only found out later when I had a dictionary that it was a water leak). Alas! How does one make oatmeal without a kitchen? With bowl and measuring cup in hand I peered up and down. I then made my sneaky descent into the kitchen on floor three.
We didn’t get anything done today in writing. Our teacher kept on digressing and then someone went on a soap box about wanting to learn more grammar which led to (at least) an hour long discussion about it. Needless to say, the grammar that we were doing didn’t get done (we corrected about 10/40 exercises). Oh the joys of level 5! The philosophy with level five is that you know everything and you just need a little push out the window to get you speaking and writing like a pro. Thus the conventional workbook and “today we are talking about this grammar principle” are thrown out the window, which gets the water to a full boil.
So once upon a yesterday Mari figured out that there was a track behind her building. The next day she threw on her running gear and went to the track. The track made her happy, it was home. There was even a fast runner running with his shorts safety pinned because the slit went so high. This made her smile, as did the sight of hurdles. And man, were they ghetto hurdles, but Mari was still content to have a track in her backyard. She had a great workout plan 2x100 meters of hurdles followed by 1x300m sprinting. Yet by the 7th repetition, while hurdling, her calf would spasm each time her foot made contact with the ground. This was quite painful, so Mari had to stop running. This made her sad. Her legs hurt a lot so Mari walked to the store and bought some bananas and chocolate chocolate chip cookies. She also bought a baguette for the man who was begging that she would pass for the fourth time that day. Mari tried the cookies. They tasted deliciously like America, and 12 whole cookies for only 60 centime (cents)! That night, Mari ended up eating 1/4 of the cookie box, but it made her feel better. The end.
I have somehow done absolutely no homework today. I seem to have gotten sidetracked looking up grammar. My problem with grammar is Mme Cherafoui uses the grammatical terms to describe things which I do not know. Thus I started making a handy dandy chart for us Anglophones so that I will never again wake up in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, smack my forehead and exclaim that I don’t know grammar...because it will all be there, on that single page on my computer.