Hello Again

For the second time in a row, I got a "Hello" today when I dropped my daughter off at school. The first time was Friday. (Yesterday was a planning day, so no school.) Today, another "Hello" as she got out. How long will this lucky streak last? (There are eight more days of school before vacation. Dare I hope?...)

My Daughter said "Hello" (!!!)

Hello All,

My apologies for my prolonged absence. Things have been so bad and stressful and difficult, I just didn't feel I should come online and be the Voice of Doom. Things have been HARD.

This morning, though, a ray of sunshine through the clouds: for the first time EVER, my daughter replied to my "Have a nice day" with something other than the slamming of the passenger side car door: she said "Hello." (In Hungarian, hello is used as a general greeting. You say it when you come up to people, but also when you take leave of them.)

I have no doubt that this was a consequence of yesterday's meeting with our social worker. It was a pretty heavy meeting, with a lot of hard things said. Basically, it was an hour and a half of bawling. I had a migraine headache for hours afterwards and my eyes hurt for the rest of the day, until I finally went to bed and sleep restored them to their almost-normal state.

I think yesterday my daughter finally got a sense of what marriage to her dad had been like for me. Without badmouthing him (that's against my values!) I finally made her understand that I didn't leave him on a whim: I had my very legitimate reasons. So today I finally got an acknowledgment to my "Have a nice day." It's a big step.

Some of the stuff that came out in yesterday's meeting has me so outraged that I feel like I might explode, but I won't dwell on that now. Today's post shall remain a happy one. This morning was a small victory. A Small Miracle. :o)

My Favorite Yoga Teacher Is Back. Yahoo! :D

Granted, I have had a lot of "favorite" yoga teachers as I went through different things in life and a different teacher's class was best suited to each different phase, but this one guy is my all-time fave. His name is Greg and his classes have always been challenging. I was feeling downright scared of going to his class today, but I got through it no sweat - okay, I admit it, there was sweat! - and I feel so good now afterwards. I think this will make it just that much easier to try to keep my word and keep going to yoga at least once a week.

But that's not all! Another amazingly good thing happened to me this afternoon. Daughter finally brought her Mother's Day present home today and part of it was a scroll with a poem that she had written. I have to say it made me feel very, very happy. Her class had written poems last year also and when I told her that hers was nice, she said she had just taken a Hungarian Mother's Day poem she knew and translated it to French. That had made me feel sad because in essence she was saying that she didn't want to work on a present too hard if it was just for me. This year, on the other hand, although she ignored the fact that she is in French school and wrote in Hungarian, she made the poem up all by herself. And it's really super - and kind of funny: I think it is the first Mother's Day poem in history to mention earthworms! lol At first I was taken aback by that, but basically she just wrote that the sun is shining after the rain and there are worms in the puddles. Hey, it rhymes in Hungarian! :D

Time To Plan

Well, I'm in. I got a nice fat envelope in the mail with a letter saying that I have been accepted to the Univeristy of Ottawa as a third-year student in their four-year bachelor's program in translation. What a relief! At the entrance exam, I wasn't sure how well I had done. Well enough, apparently!

This is a tremendous relief. Now I know that I can go to U of O, and I can let the Université du Québec know that I won't be attending their classes in the fall. But before even thinking about classes, there is lots to do, and the major hurdle in going to university will of course be the financial hurdle.

So, today's post is short, because I have to find and download the student loan application on the Goverment of Quebec's web site, and once that is filled out, I also have to start applying for various bursaries and scholarships. Wish me luck!

I am feeling energized and hopeful about the future. :o)

My Mind Is Messing With Me

A very strange morning I had today, but all's well that ends well.

Last night I had the strangest dream. I was taking an entrance exam to get into university, and one of the questions was a number line with empty spaces where I had to fill in the numbers. I kept writing the numbers so messily that they weren't recognizable so I had to erase them and that only created nasty smudges so in the end nothing was visible. I was given a blank sheet of paper and a ruler and was told to copy down the question and complete it on the new paper. The ruler was wooden and it was warped from having been soaked in water so I couldn't make a straight line. Then I had trouble copying the numbers that were already given in the question onto my paper. I was really stressed and frustrated and in the end time was up and I didn't complete the exam. Strangely, I woke up wondering if I would still be accepted based on the answers I had provided for the other questions. Weird.

I didn't have much time to dwell on the dream because it was time to get up and make lunches. Daughter and I had an appointment at 9:00 so I walked to the end of our street, where the boys go to school, then us girls took our time getting ready to leave. We arrived at the CLSC for 9:00 and the receptionist took our names. We waited in the waiting room for the social worker to come down for us. The wait was rather long. Finally, I asked the receptionist if the social worker would be coming down soon. She said she had left her a message on her phone. This is where I started getting worried. Left her a message? She hadn't picked up? Wasn't she waiting for us?

At first I thought perhaps she was late getting to work, but as over twenty minutes went by, I was getting more and more upset. I started thinking that maybe I had come on the wrong day, or at the wrong time. It's no secret that I have memory problems thanks to the medications I am taking. Did I get mixed up? Was my mind messing with me? As I sat there waiting, I was wracking my brain trying to remember if perhaps the appointment hadn't been for this afternoon. I almost convinced myself that it HAD been for the afternoon. The social worker must be out on a call... Maybe she had an emergency...

At 9:30 we decided to leave. I dropped Daughter off at school and headed home. The first thing I did was check the calendar. I hadn't made a mistake. It said, "9 am at the CLSC." A wave of relief washed over me. I had been so worried that my brain had quit on me again, but it hadn't! I didn't know why the social worker hadn't been there. Perhaps she really did have an emergency that she had to go to. She has plenty of other cases besides ours, and I'll bet most of them aren't like ours, with a mother and daughter sharing a difficult relationship.  Some of them are surely cases of family abuse and other such terrible problems. All in all, I feel lucky. Even though our problem is very real and very hard on both of us, I have hope that we will eventually gets past it. Granted, it is very hard for us to communicate. I feel really rejected by Daughter and she feels so much anger at me for having "ripped the family apart." This is exactly what we had been hoping to work on this morning. It didn't happen, but it will.

A nice little surprise was waiting for me when I turned the computer on a little later. It doesn't quite make up for the stressful morning, but it is a bit of good news at least: I have been accepted to l'Université du Québec en Outaouais in their translation and writing program. Yaay! As I have mentioned before, I really would rather like to go to the University of Ottawa because theirs is only a two-year program, but if by any chance I don't get accepted, at least I can go to l'Université du Québec en Outaouais and still become a translator, even if it takes me three years to do it. 

The timing of this university acceptance makes me wonder about my dream last night. Either my mind is messing with me or it's a weird coincidence, don't you think?

Take Two

A few weeks ago I shared my excitement of having written an entrance exam at the Université du Québec en Outaouais. Today was the University of Ottawa exam. Hopefully one or the other (dare I hope both?) of these schools will accept me into their translation program.

Today's exam was quite different from the previous one. For one thing, we weren't allowed our Petit Larousse and Webster's Collegiate dictionaries. It was also a paper exam, so I had to be really careful not to misspell anything because I had no spell-check to back me up. The types of questions were also pretty different. Both exams were three hours long.

Today's exam started with ten grammar questions. Each question had four sentences in it. We had to find the sentence with the grammar mistake and then correct it. This part was pretty easy, since these are the things I used to harp on when I taught French as a Second Language. 

The second section was vocabulary and I do have to admit there were plenty of words I wasn't familiar with. Most of my French vocabulary is career and government-related, and some of these questions were outside that field. I am only 100% sure of five of my ten answers. *gulp*

After this was a text with 20 mistakes in it that we had to identify and correct. The fact that I knew there were twenty helped a lot. I corrected the text, then went back and counted the mistakes that I had found. I think I did well in this section.

Next, we had to write a 350-word summary in French for a newspaper article we read in English. Pretty standard stuff.

After the summary was the English as a Second Language section, where we read an excerpt from a novel in French, and had to answer questions about it in English. Most of the questions required an answer of at least 20 words, the last one asked for 200 words. I think this part went pretty well, except for one question where we were asked to identify grammar points that were no longer used in modern French. I picked out what struck me as different and went with that, but I'm not sure if I replied correctly.

I am certainly not as confident after this exam as I was after the first one, but I still hope I did well enough to be accepted. Now that I have applied to the universities and written the entrance exams, all that is left to do it wait. It's pretty nerve-racking. I'm not as nervous about UQO as U of O, but U of O is the one I would really like to attend, especially since tuition fees are going up in Quebec. I am trying to be realistic, so I won't count my chickens before they hatch. Still, I hope that today I at least showed U of O that I have potential. We shall see...

In the meantime, life continues. The children were with my brother while I was writing the exam. He took my youngest to gymnastics and played with the other two at the playground outside. In a way, the exam was a bit of a break from the kids for me. Now I am ready to plunge in again and play, play, play! Unfortunately, the kids are pretty tuckered out, so they are vegging out in front of the TV watching a film on VHS. So, now that I have finished this post, I can focus my energies on a big pile of dirty dishes. Oh, joy!

Am I Crazy or Was That Fun?

In an effort to get myself out of debt and my tush off the couch, I have decided to try to get into even deeper debt. (This may be one of those confusing Willy Wonka "backwards is forwards" moments for you, Mrs. Gloop!) I applied to go to university. I want to become a translator. As a step towards fulfilling that dream, I wrote an entrance exam today at the Université du Québec en Outaouais.

It was so much fun! I know: I'm nuts, but I found writing a minimum 250-word opinion and translating a 300-word text from English to French to be a blast! Granted, I was pretty relaxed about it. The UQO diploma takes three years, whereas the one at the University of Ottawa only takes two. Given the choice, I would much rather do my Bachelor at U of O so this test didn't really phase me. It actually made me look forward to the next one, which will be on March 24th. (That's a Saturday. I must remember to confirm with my sitter.)

It was a big decision to go back to school and right now it is still pretty daunting. I have so much debt already, but I have faith that with a diploma in translation I can get a good job that pays well and that I like. That last bit is very important, since I have lost interest in what I have been doing, which is working in the French as a Second Language trade of teaching federal public servants French. As much as I loved all our students - I really did meet some amazingly intelligent and nice people - the conditions suck.

Ten years ago, I earned 21 dollars an hour teaching a group of about six students. Today, there are schools hiring experienced teachers for fifteen. It's really an insult, but the schools can do it because they know full well that the market is saturated. There are more teachers than students to teach.

I'm not the only one who wants to get out. I would need extra fingers and toes to count the number of my teachers who have asked me for reference letters. (I have climbed the ranks to Teaching Advisor.) I don't blame them. Pretty nearly everyone working in a private school in the Ottawa area wants to get into the government. Most of my teachers are paid hourly through contracts, meaning they have to put money aside for taxes at the end of the year and, most importantly, meaning that they have no benefits. No sick days, no Employment Insurance if they lose their position. A lucky few have landed dream jobs as French as a Second Language teachers directly for federal governmental departments. They have become casual and in some cases term public employees. But all that is about to end. The government announced that all the teaching positions are getting the ax as part of its cuts as of March 31st. Which means more teachers looking for jobs in private schools. Good for the schools. Bad for the teachers.

Another reason I wanted to change fields is because I really didn't like my job any more. It got really tedious fighting with upper management for teachers' rights, fighting with teachers for them to respect deadlines and protocols and for students' rights (like the right to have a teacher IN the classroom   instead of on their way to work at the time class is scheduled to start.) Then there is "fighting" with students. (I put that in quotes because they aren't "students", but "clients" and I have to keep them "happy.") I "fought" with students who did't show up on time, disrupting class when they arrived and noisily got settled 30 minutes late every day. I "fought" with students who didn't want or need to be bilingual and who made no effort whatsoever to learn French, because their boss was going to reclassify their position as unilingual English if they didn't get their B's. Etc. Etc.

I have discovered through volunteering that I LIKE translating and I think that is the key factor in my future success. I have friends and acquaintances who are translators both in the public and private sectors and they all tell me the same thing: conditions are good. So I have decided I will do what I like and be recognized (i.e. receive a fair salary) for it. I know you can't get anywhere unless you know where you want to go. Where I want to go is a place where I have financial security and I can give my children the things they need and deserve. Starting with hot meals every night.

I'm looking forward to getting the results. In the meantime, I am looking forward to my weekend. You all have a good one! :o)