You Want Me To Do What?

Midterm grades are out. Everything is how I expected it to be, except for one thing.

Remember my Islamic speech I had to give? That screwed my Seminar grade up, although it really shouldn't have. Here's what happened.

The night before the speech, I went over to St. John's to work with the 2 other guys in my group. We seperated topics among the 3 of us, and I ended up with the different religious practices of the Sunnis and the Shiites. Fine, that seems easy enough.

And it was going to be. I was to go 2nd, talk about religion, phase into the leaders, then hand it off to our last guy to wrap it up. I stayed up until 2 am writing and reciting my speech, and actually felt pretty good.

Until I got to class the next morning. We were scheduled to present first. I got there and the guy who was supposed to go first decided that he was now going to go third. The guy going third was going first, literally reversing my speech. Do you think maybe somebody could have called me the night before and TOLD me the plan? No, that would make way too much sense!

So I had exactly 2 minutes to reverse my speech. I tried to frantically get my notecards in a new order, draw arrows, renumber my points, etc. Guy who is now in position 3 goes, "Oh, also, we don't want you to talk about this, this aaaaand........this." I stared at him, dumbfounded. No words escaped my mouth except, "Uhh..err...mmm....huh?"

Oh, so uh, he just took half of my speech. Did he expect me to compensate? You bet.

It was a disaster. Not only was I trying to do my speech backwards, but I was trying to make my topics flow, which was nearly impossible because he cut all of my middle topics out! We got a B on the speech, but it easily could have been an A. If I had had more time to prepare, it would have come out better. Also, the guys didn't pull it off well either. They didn't reverse their speech...they just swapped spots. So really, what they were saying didn't make sense. I managed to fill in the holes in my part, but the 3rd guy just dug a new hole.

The good news? I got an A on my German midterm. I studied way too hard for that test, and it's about freaking time that I see some reward!

I'm not bragging, by the way. I'm just celebrating.