Getting a 'D' grade

15 years after graduation, I still get the occasional nightmare about turning up for exams without having studied a single thing.

Do you ever get those kinds of recurring dreams?

I don't think I could, or want to, go through those exam years again.

So why did I put myself through the Dip in Translation Skills with SCCIOB 3 years ago?

That was a bit of madness.

The fun sort.

My Dip classmates and I had an agreement.

We wanted to do the Dip by the intensive route.

We had a choice of intensive or leisure and like most waste-no-time Singaporeans, we committed ourselves to two modules a term instead of one, so that we could finish in 9 months instead of 18.
Each lesson was 3 hours long, and each module took 3 months to complete. You can imagine the number of hours a week we spent at Hill St after work.

It was a crazy schedule, and nearly all of us were working full-time then.

But we pulled it off and graduated with another useful qualification to add to our CVs.

Funny how I started out in life being neutral towards Mandarin and just mugging for the sake of assignments and exams.

Then as I grew older, I started seeing that it was a beautiful thing to be able to speak Mandarin fluently (which I don't, by the way - just ask my Dip classmates), to read the Bible in Mandarin, to sing hymns in Mandarin.

Have you tried reading a Bible verse in English, then reading the same verse in Chinese?

It's an amazing experience.

Is it just Mandarin, or is it the way a whole new world opens up to you when you are able to communicate in another language?

Now I'm hitting the books again.

I chose to do a Dip in Publishing because I want to know what really goes on after an author submits a manuscript to his agent or publisher.

Who's involved?
How does it get to the final state when it's printed and bound and put on bookshelves in Collins and Angus & Robertson?

And secretly of course: how can I get there? ;-)

So here we are again, swotting and doing assignments.

Hopefully, I've learnt from my years of being a not-very-exam-smart student.

My first assignment came back with a... 'D'.

Horrors!

Did I misread the instructions?

Surely not. I had read and re-read them and checked my answers quite carefully before sending them off to QLD.

I looked desperately at the interpretation key at the very bottom of the cover sheet.

The one that explains what your grades really mean.

D = Distinction *beam*

One module down, 13 to go.

It's nice to know my brains have not completely deserted me after 3 years away from full-time work.