Friday, June 30, 2006

A tale of OPIs

This morning I called my French professor from Grace in order to have my OPI (Oral Proficiency Interview) with her. This was my second French OPI... or actually the third, since the first was a practice to estimate student levels during the Intermediate French class, which was in a galaxy far, far away, many, many lightyears ago. Oops, lightyears measure distance and not time, right? Wrong. They measure both, given the theory of relativity. But I'm getting off subject (which I have a perfect right to do on a Friday night, right? Wrong... well, okay, I'll stop being annoying. By the way, can you tell anyone's had to write a lot of French style dissertations lately: thesis-antithesis-synthesis?)

The second OPI, late in the fall 2005 semester, was to determine my level before leaving to study abroad in France. Somehow I attained Advanced despite having spent a several-hours-long Language Table lunchtime of speaking French and German, followed by the Spanish OPI (in the cafeteria), followed at last by the French OPI, all on several hours of sleep. Afterward my brain felt tired.

Today's OPI was post-study-abroad and resulted in Superior, the highest level attainable. Praise the Lord!

(For those curious, ACTFL describes what characterizes the various OPI levels.)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Very happy for you, ma chère.

And not terribly surprised, either :-)