Falling asleep in a lecture

First of all, I have to admit that the picture doesn’t quite go with the story of me falling asleep in a lecture. It is, nevertheless, a rather cute dog!

What are the memorable moments as a first-year undergraduate at Oxford? Well, quite a few:

- I sat there in the Student Common Room among other first-year undergrads, smiling and nodding while one of them was talking, looking attentive and desperately hiding the fact that I didn't understand the conversation. Despite passing all the academic exams, my English wasn’t up to speed with casual conversation. Isn’t is so unhelpful that neither IELTS nor TOEFL, SAT or any entrance exams test you on your capability in having a casual chat in a pub?!

- My classmate was surprised and impressed that I said “well, 14 divided by four would be 3.5…” without even thinking, and she went “are you sure?” and checked with her calculator just in case there was a mistake. The lucky secondary school students in the UK were allowed calculators. We were never allowed to use them at secondary schools in China. I wasn’t particularly quick nor accurate at mental maths, compared with those who would get similar maths scores at me in the high school exams. I could handle the logic of maths but was simply very “untrained” when mental maths was concerned, because I spent “easy” primary school years in Japan while my counterparts in China were doing homework until 11 pm. But suddenly, that brand of "being able to do maths but can't do the basic calculation fast" which I acquired in China disappeared as I entered Oxford...

- I fell asleep in a lecture. It wasn’t even boring. It wasn’t even late in the day. I fell asleep simply because I had a one-hour tutorial with a demanding tutor beforehand (note: tutorials are those one-to-one or one-to-two lessons). Of course, I was generally feeling tired, having started university in a new country in a language that wasn’t my own, but it’s crazy that at the age of 19, you could be totally worn out in one hour. I guess part of it was stress and nerves. After all, the tutor called my essay “high school standard” a couple of tutorials before, and I felt challenged and wanted to find a hole to hide whenever he looked at me. In any case, the fact was that after that hour, I sat there in a lecture that sounded interesting, but the reassurance that nobody would be picking me and asking a question that I had no answer to led to some sort of a "relaxing" state in which I fell asleep. I remember waking up, wanting to focus and falling asleep again throughout that lecture!