Feeling slow

It's been a day of mixed fortunes, little victories in C++ being offset by progressively harder Italian. I should've guessed that being at IC means you're rarely ahead of the class in whatever discipline, there's always someone brighter and bolder leading the way and you have to drop your 'top of the class' tag of highschool and be prepared to shoulder 'mediocrity'.

It's not a bad thing, for one you aren't always pestered by other students for tutorial answers or to form study groups and the shock wore off soon after first year. Then again, deparment-wise that's understandable, everyone comes from different educational backgrounds, although it seems that four As at A-levels isn't so much the preferred qualification of secondary education as the bare minimum, and no one really starts on equal terms. Some can build and rebuild all kinds of engines from scratch, while others possess supernatural levels of mathematical ability (since I don't have either talent, I obviously struggle).

But in beginner's Italian? Mg. The reason I decided to go with Italian, aside from slacking away my whole summer and not picking up a sufficient level of French, was that by starting at the beginning, everyone's supposed to be at the same level. I should've been more wary having been suitably intimidated by the obvious experience in European language the rest of the class possessed in terms of level-gazillion French right at the start of term, but all of a sudden I'm still level 1 Italian and they're jabbering away in it like a second language (or third or fourth in some cases).

Unbelieveable.

I'm fully determined to get there though. Once I get this tutorial (unforunately the first of many) out of the way, I'm going to study pages 1-40 of my textbook and work on not getting left behind.