Punishment for a Perfectionist?



My Paper with Corrections



You know the old saying, be careful what you ask for as you might get it.  I am experiencing that right now.   When selecting a school for my French immersion, I went to great care to select a school that was serious about learning.  I had concern that some were more about the vacationing than the learning.  I made sure the program I selected was a language school.  Now I am suffering for it.

A while back we had an assignment to use 20 verbs in a story. The verbs were “movement” verbs.  Yes, the French really have this many verbes about movement.  I chose to tell a story about my trip to Italy last fall, at least in part because we did so many different things, I thought I could use all the verbs.  In this regard, I did a pretty good job.  I used 16 of the 20, or 80%.  And I used most of them correctly.

When I read my story in class, it was clear I had a number of errors.  My professor volunteered that if I emailed her the story, she’d correct all my mistakes.  For this I was grateful as I learn best by seeing what I did wrong and for something like this hearing it in class was not enough.  The next day she returned me my original version and a corrected one.  Wow did I make a lot of mistakes! And I thought pronunication was going to be my problem. 

Of course, I needed to evaluate my mistakes.  I went through and marked all the mistakes in red ink so I could see the actual errors.   Here’s what I learned. 

I made 16 careless errors.  Most of these were not putting an “s” on the verb for plural or an extra “e” for feminine.  I made this error 13 times.  I did not know this rule when I wrote the story but have since learned.    Nonetheless, I went to my writing for today and found I had made the error a couple of times.  I corrected them. 

Another 13 involved little words like on, a, to, the, that, pronouns, etc. I seem to have a lot of trouble understanding these.  Six involved verb tense, which we are studying almost every day. 

The bottom line I’m getting to only four involved using the words we were assigned incorrecly.  Okay, when you make 50 errors in a story of only 323 words, you have to really look for the positive.  I’m glad I didn’t have a chance to review until today or I might have found it discouraging. 

All joking aside, this really was a good experience.  I learned a lot.  I so appreciate the professor taking the time to individually correct my writing. Some of these mistakes I won’t make again and some I am sure I will need to have corrected more than once.   Although at times it is difficult, I am glad I chose a school that is serious about learning and has professors dedicated to help even the slow students like me.  Everyone is so encouraging.   

You might also find it amusing that I now have trouble in English.  For example, I typed “verbe” rather than “verb” every time in this document.   So if there are errors in English in this document just assume I spelled them the French way.

I think I need that chocolate éclair.



Chocolate Eclair