Suspense!!

A little background information for those of you who are unfamiliar with the court reporting speed classes (which is pretty much going to be anybody reading this blog):

For each speed class, you have to pass two literary, two jury charge, and two testimony takes to pass the class. Speed I's requirements are 100 Lit and 125 JC and TM. The takes are five-minute dictations, and you transcribe from your notes at a later time. Your transcription has to be at least 96% accurate to pass (that's 1% above the National Court Reporter's Association requirements. It used to be 97%, but the graduation rates were miserable, so they recently changed it.) I have passed all of my takes except for one testimony.

I took down a really great testimony take last Thursday and skipped my ethics class to transcribe it because it was incredibly good. Also, I wanted to get it down while it was still fresh in my head. There is one questionable spot in my notes towards the end where there was a list of about four doctors. Their names were simple, but at that point, my brain was saying, "OH, NO! Names! I've been doing so well, I hope I don't screw this up!" Needless to say, my notes looked like slop around that part. But I think I pulled it off well enough to still pass.

This could very well be my last take for Speed I. The anxiety of not knowing if I passed or not is killing me. I may not even find out until tomorrow. My professor picked up Thursday's takes to check, but was sick yesterday. She may not have looked at them during the weekend or while she was ill (I wouldn't blame her).

I'm going absolutely nuts over here. I keep checking Blackboard obsessively to see if maybe it was posted there, but she's pretty terrible about keeping the online gradebook updated, so I don't even know why I bother. I'm trying not to keep my hopes too high in case I end up not passing it. I never expected this program to be so emotionally taxing. Hell, I wasn't even under this much pressure at Basic Training.

Other students here with different majors enjoy whining about how their program is so hard and so difficult...yeah, right. They go home and maybe do a half hour of homework, if anything. We go home and do at least two hours of homework every day, including two hours sometime during the weekend, just for our speed classes. Then we have homework from our procedures classes and anything else tacked on by core education classes. Not to mention that unless you're a complete dumbass, anybody can attain any other major at this school, but it's not just anyone who can graduate from the court reporting/captioning department. We have less than half of the people with us now from when we began our first theory course in September of '09. And that's the average. Less than half of those who begin this program will make it.

Whew, okay. Sorry for the very long novel. That's just been rolling around in my head since Thursday, and I needed some kind of medium to get it out onto. Time to go grab another cup of coffee and try to think of something else for awhile.