The boy passed his German class. He was all worried because he pretty much did fail all the tests, but as I recall, he pretty much did that last semester too.
The difference is that he A) Did all his work this time and B) Showed up to class on a regular basis. The guy teaching knew he had to get a C to pass, and knew that Nathan was driving more than an hour to get to class every single day. That's a dedication to the cause that means you're not going to fail unless your professor is a total prick. If he hadn't missed class so often last semester and had actually looked like he was trying harder, the guy would've raised his grade like that and we wouldn't have had all this mess.
I know teachers, most of them don't try to be pissants, especially if they're not teaching 150 people (then they don't give a shit, two points away from a B- is still a C+). This was a summer course, there were all of 15 people in the class (maybe), and he missed less class and figures he did more homework than anyone else save the guy from Turkey (who has a European work ethic baffling to Americans).
Anyway, we're all very proud of the boy for this accomplishment. If not proud, at least glad that we won't be hearing any more moaning about working at Lowe's for the rest of his life and being a total failure.
I still don't understand why he's so hopeless at language. He's had both semesters twice and still can't conjugate common irregular verbs. Haben and sein serve the exact same purposes as avoir and �tre do in French, they're the two you need to know, and he still doesn't. Of course, like most American learners of language, he is dedicated to never using it again.
On the other hand, I am hoping to use up all my electives for the next two years in language courses again. Basically, I know both languages up to the subjunctive. I'm not certain whether I should just take the last course I had over again, to know I know it, or if it would be better to take a literature course. I think I could do it in French, but I don't know if I could in German yet.
Actually, the problem is that neither of them are in particularly good working order, so I have a habit of mixing both languages, using German when I can't think of the French and vice versa. I sound like the Bosnian kids on our bus who used to mix Bosnian and English liberally, but at least they could understand one another.
If I change my mind and don't go for languages (they tend to be four and five credit hours, which may be far more than I need), I'm trying to decide whether to take a graphic design or an art course. I loved my old Drawing and Rendering course because it was pretendy art. No one was terribly talented and it was mostly an exercise in experiment.
"We're doing watercolours this week, try to paint the lightest areas first, you could try wet on dry or wet on wet, go to it."
"We're doing timed sketches. You have twenty seconds to sketch this, go."
"Take an object and draw it scaled up to at least twice the size it is now. Here's the grid to try it, but you can do it some other way if you like."
It was fun, and I have a lot of scribbles from that as well as a vauge interest in watercolour. Although, as I said in class, my technique is all borrowed from watching far too much Bob Ross as a child, so I paint with watercolours rather more like oils.
Happy little trees bleeding into the happy little clouds.