Apuleius class results

I got an A! Yay! This is the first A, straight up, no qualifiers, that I have received in Latin graduate school, and I actually feel like I deserved it. I think this blog helped enormously. I have spent the past several years trying to find the most productive and best way for me to translate and study, and nothing quite seemed to work for me. I asked a few professors, and they were less than unhelpful. I'll never forget my Fall professor saying, "Don't work so hard. Just do it better." which made me want to thwack him. But the process I developed for this blog has been working wonderfully. I feel like my Latin improved more this last semester than in the two years before.

The Process
1. Copying the Latin text from The Latin Library to my blog.
2. Taking it a sentence at a time, I list the words I don't recognize and need to look up.
3. Look up the words.
4. Translate the passage into English and write down the translation in the blog.
5. Check my translation against another's translation to see if I missed anything major.
6. Correct my English translation if necessary.
7. Translate in class from the Latin, using my English translation as a backup if necessary.

I could, if I need to know it even better, write out the translations of the words I needed to look up, and then  re-translate the whole thing from Latin by sight. The above method is the minimum, though, and by doing it that way, I was able to translate both familiar and unfamiliar passages well enough on the exams to get As on both tests. That is the first time it's happened.  What a blessing this experience was and continues to be.