Competence and Lack Thereof

With every day that goes by here at Mizzou I am painfully aware of how competent I am, compared to most Freshmen. I don't take all the credit for this myself. I also appreciate that I had an excellent education through the Parkway school district, for example. Still, I know that Mizzou students are considered a pretty good bunch, all in all. So why do I feel like I was more challenged in high school? Why do I feel shocked and amazed by the ineptitude that surrounds me? Oddly enough, Tabi and Clint agree with me. (They're the only two I've talked to about this). Now, they're both smart, and, examining Foreign Language for an example, Tabi has lived in France and Clint has spent a reasonable amount of time in Germany, Spain, and Costa Rica, so they have head starts. But still!

My German class. I'm not going to lie, it's challenging for me. As German Intermediate II - Language and Culture, it's the class students normally take after a few years of college German. Most of my classmates studied German for 3-5 years in high school, and 1-3 semesters in Uni. I know I'm good at languages, so we'll adjust for that and ignore the fact that I can tread water in the class. What scares me is that they seem to be treading water as well. :O At first I noticed that, although my speaking ability in German is despicable and I wince at myself every time I open my mouth, not only am I STILL more comfortable speaking in front of others (seriously, is Parkway the only school district that pushes this?), my German isn't noticeably worse than theirs. Okay, I thought, so Parkway taught me to be brave... they probably have a better fundamental knowledge of German. I bet they can read better than me, for example, or that their Grammar is better. The boy who sits next to me is pretty smart, but we have about the same record of not knowing words in the readings, and my understanding of Grammar (if not my actual usage) is a bit better. Okay, I thought, so I have studied half a dozen languages, including Latin, I understand grammar a bit better than most... but still... :( He's studied German for 6 years, the same amount that I have studied Spanish. Now, I know that at 3 years of Spanish I was better with Spanish than I am now at German, but I'm at 6 years in Spanish and my Spanish blows any of the German students in this class's German out of the water. And that's just a fact. This isn't meant to be a bragpost. I'm honestly more concerned about the curriculum and what they're doing wrong than what I'm doing right. I thought it was just hard work... but while I've always put a little extra emphasis into Spanish, and of course, my devotion alone produces results in Norwegian or the others, I have almost embarrassingly neglected German.