Complaining about studying progress
Really feel like I'm losing a ton of my time trying to figure out the inconsistencies between the sources that are provided for this course. It also doesn't help that the course instructor evidently does not provide enough examples and she also doesn't know how to make the right/wrong examples actually reference only the rule being discussed. In fact, some of the wrong examples seem to be wrong in ways that aren't even related to the current rule, which makes them pretty useless to work with and hard to correct. I don't know why she doesn't provide the corrections for the "wrong" examples, either. It's so much guesswork.
I've sent like over 5 emails in the past two to three days after discovering that she tosses out a whole bunch of rules I was writing down and trying to internalize in the grammar book (that was written by someone else but required for her course). This would be fine if, again, there were actually proper documentation and examples of what she actually means in place of the grammar book. I'm not looking forward to having to figure out how to adjust many of the exercises from the workbook manually to fit this course's preferences, especially because I'm worried that I might not do it right.
There also seems to be other random frameworks here that I don't have a good handle on and the course doesn't really seem to explain, like what counts as "relatively short" sentence, what decides whether something is "formal".
I email her and she mostly answers my questions but not really. Am I just too in-the-weeds? I just don't want to fail the exam when I get there but apparently half of all her students fail it the first time. I cannot stop thinking that the reason why they are failing it is because her training materials are not good enough. Providing two different grammar books that you then sometimes diverge from is chaos when you don't write as many examples as supplemental material.
In fact, I tried looking up a rule in both grammar books once just to see her version listed in neither of them.
One of the random things she has brought up only over email is that if you use a colon to introduce an "enumerated" series, then you should semicolons to separate them because colons should match the formality of the semicolons. Of course, I had to then decipher that this doesn't apply to normal series that are not numbered (or lettered) because apparently formality doesn't matter then. Why do I have to do so much work to reverse engineer what someone should be able to teach me from the get-go?
Is it too much to ask for a reference text to have at least 5 examples that all pertain to the rule, and to list what types of exceptions one might encounter, or what counts as what?
I cannot stop thinking that I could write a course better than this. I guess the course is probably not her main moneymaker and so it's not as important to make it easy for her students to learn. Or somehow this grammar section is just the one where she cares the least and the other sections in the future are better, or something. I really want to get to the notetaking (steno) section so I can actually see what else is beyond this grammar rule mismatch struggle. But who knows when I'll get there at the rate I'm going.
I've increased my studying to 4 hours a day but it's still not fast when there's all this other stuff I have to somehow tease out and make sense of. I cannot help but feel that my failure in the exam the first time around is simply inevitable because I will have gotten something that wasn't clear wrong.
I wish there was someone who already passed this exam that I could ask for help. I actually did reach out to someone on Tumblr at one point but then I realized that the person was a TERF, Harry Potter fan and all. I don't know if I should've just pretend I didn't notice and LARP as my cis gender to get information and build a fake relationship with this person to get help with this material. It's hard having hypermorality because I can't tell what is excusable or what is platforming someone with harmful beliefs. Like if it was in real life I would probably just not say anything and continue to work on whatever it was that we had to work on together. But I guess because I'm the one asking for help it feels like I have more obvious choice in the matter which means...
It's all hard, though. I'm just tired. I don't think I'm doing this good. Most people in the world are transphobic so what do I even expect? I don't ever expect to do business under my real pronouns anyway, since they're neopronouns. I only recently got the people I'm living with to start using they/them for me, and I don't even like they/them. It feels wrong. But even that is like a monumental ask for people. chat am i cooked