St. Nick

DISCLAIMER: Whatever I have written about JNU is only and solely related to the languages department and not the university as a whole. I mean no disrespect to anyone and apologize to anyone who may have felt personally attacked.

First things first.

EXAMS ARE OVER. 

I am officially done with my time at JNU! 

Thanks JNU. It's been an "interesting" few months. 

If you think that was meant to be sarcasm.

Well.

You'd be right.

No, but really. Even with all it's administrative problems, JNU has honestly opened my eyes to the fact that being passive in life is not going to get you anywhere. 

So really JNU. Thanks.

Anyway.

Last Saturday the Belgian and Dutch community celebrated Sinterklaas, the original Santa Claus.

THERE WAS AN ELEPHANT. 

It became quite literally the best day ever.

The rest of this week was a bit...

Odd.

So. I'm afraid I'm going to have to leave it at this for the last two weeks.

I mean I could write about how peculiar the exams are here.

Eh. Why not.

But first.

SO. During one of my exams, which, mind you was an open book exam, the teacher had specifically said that the use of wi-fi was not allowed. (Which to be fair, is pretty alright considering if you just read the stories once which we were being tested on, there's a fairly good chance you'll do decently.)

But I mean why would anyone decide to listen to the teacher. It's not like they're giving grades or whatever.

A student decided to use his phone. To... I dunno google stuff or something. The teacher took the phone away and let it be.

Not five minutes later did this kid pull out another phone to... yeah probably google stuff.

I mean... come on. Seriously? You took the effort to find two phones and you couldn't find the effort to at least read one of the poems we discussed? Pretty sure that it would have been more difficult to find these phones than it would have been to think about why the poet wrote what he did.

OH. And then. During the American Literature exam.

We had three hours to complete a fairly lengthy exam but if you paced yourself you would have been able to complete it in the allotted time.

First of all, the original exam sheet (which was made official by the chairman) stated that the exam would start at 10. But I mean no reason it should actually start at 10 right? Might as well just change the timing of the exam to 2pm less than 12 hours before. Makes complete sense.

Anyway, thats besides the point. It wasn't an easy exam, but it wasn't tough neither as it was open book and all you needed to do was think logically and have understood what the teacher discussed the past semester.

About a half hour into the exam the teacher leaves and her PhD student takes over for her (which is fine because the teacher is in a wheelchair and has breathing problems).

About 45 minutes later a student gets up and proceeds to ask the class (loudly) who all wants tea or coffee. Which I guess is fine, just a bit weird that you would want to waste exam time to grab a coffee. Especially considering you literally just complained about the fact that it was in fact a very lengthy exam.

But you know. Whatever floats your boat.

So 20 minutes pass and the chai wala brings tea for those who want. At this point I'm about 1/3 done with the exam.

About two hours into the exam, when the proctor leaves, I'm just about to finish my last question when that same student who asked for coffee and tea asked the class "how do you answer question one."

Thanks, JNU. My stress-levels may have shot up but at least now I know that it's okay to be a bit selfish when it comes to work.