apology

Sorry for my long absence from this blog. We are back to school in the Billing-Cartwright household, in the middle of our second week of classes for the semester. The whole back-to-the-grind thing has been keeping us hopping. I'm firmly entrenched in coursework, and Ben is keeping very busy between the classes he's teaching, and the progress he's making toward preparing for his comps. Unfortunately, all of this busy-ness hasn't left a lot of time for either blogging, or doing things worth blogging about.

In my last post, I wrote about my spring semester placement exam score. I was really happy to have done so well on the test, but my high score left me with a dilemma: what level of class should I actually enroll in? After much thought, perusal of textbooks, and discussion with my teacher from last semester, I finally decided to enroll in the Intermediate 2 class. That's three levels higher than the class I was in last semester, but two levels lower than the class I tested into. Right in the middle sounded just about right.

However, I'm finding that this level is more than challenging. In fact, I'm struggling to keep up on the work right now. We have one or two quizzes almost daily, and I have to work pretty hard to learn the new material for those quizzes and simultaneously make sense of the vocabulary I should have learned before entering this level. This all adds up to me spending 5 or more hours outside of class every day, just trying to study sufficiently and get my homework done. Between 4 hours of class every day and 5+ hours of study, there isn't a whole lot of time for doing much of anything else. Unfortunately, it also doesn't leave me with a lot of brain power to think of anything to write or say when a few moments of free time arise.

So, all of this is to say I may not be such a frequent poster on my blog this semester. I'll try to put something up once a week, but if I miss a week, don't worry. It doesn't necessarily mean any catastrophe has occurred--well, no catastrophe other than me being buried up to my neck in Chinese textbooks, anyway.