If it's a competition, I'm there.

For reasons not totally unbeknownst to me, but certainly unnecessarily, I've been placing a lot of stress on myself this last week. Issues with unruly students have been coming to a head lately making my working day just a smidge less than tolerable, resulting in a tired and grumpy Chi-Hé. And she's not someone you wanna reckon with. But above all, today was the day that I would potentially take the unprecedented leap from BEGINNER to INTERMEDIATE level Korean class.

Now it wasn't that I wanted to level up for self-congratulatory purposes. I'm not really about to bust a gut over something that is ultimately a hobby with beneficial outcomes. For instance, if I felt I could do with the extra practice I would willingly - perhaps voluntarily, as I have previously done - retake a class. But it wasn't about how good I felt I was; it was about how good I felt I was in comparison to other people. Feeling that I was on a par with my classmates, the fact that the fate of my progress was at the mercy of a subjective aural/oral test and the whim of my teacher made me feel a little uneasy.

The teacher composed the level test as a kind of on-going competition, whereby each time you formed an accurate sentence or answered a question correctly you would score one point (or two, or three, depending on the generosity of the teacher at that particular moment; as I say: subjective). Now, by half-time I was already ahead. Not necessarily because I was the best, but because I was the most keen.

I often go out of my way not to be the irritating student who calls out all the answers as a Miss-Know-It-All. In fact, being a teacher, I now FULLY appreciate the merits of waiting one's turn and giving other students a chance. However, since there was a competition in play, I naturally made today an exception.

The fact that everybody in the class passed the test is irrelevant. The fact that I tripled some people's scores due to my speedy hand-in-the-air is clearly what matters.