Kit's Diary

Chapter 6

Dear Ty,

today I'm only going to write a short entry as I'm super tired because I read way too much of "Romeo and Juliet". I'm going to tell you about that later. But first there's something from yesterday I forgot to tell you:

Tessa and Jem encouraged me learn some language because that would be helpful if I ever want to be an active Shadowhunter. So I elected Spanish and German. Spanish because little Rafe speaks it and Magnus too, obviously, and I think it sounds really nice. Tessa also learned Spanish when she went to school and said it's not that difficult to learn. And German because I found these really cool movies that I wanted to watch, but they're only in German and they don't have English subtitles, so I'm now learning German instead. Yesterday I had my first Spanish lesson. The teacher, Mrs Stephenson is really young and also can teach really well. The lesson was fun. We learned how to greet people and state who we are and how old we are. Hola, me llamo Kit. Tengo dieciséis años. ¿Y cómo te llamas? Did you understand that?

At home, I had a talk with Tessa in Spanish. It's actually pretty easy to learn.

Especially compared to German, in which I had my first lesson today. It's very difficult and my head hurt a bit after the lesson. But the teacher, Mrs Seymour is really good and seemed to be everyone's favourite teacher. She's really motivated and tries to help everyone catch up if they don't understand something. Though she also said that we have to learn the grammar and vocabulary regularly, otherwise we won't be able to follow the lessons because you need to learn a lot of stuff. Here, we also learned how to greet people and talk about us. I can now say: Hallo, ich heiße Kit. Ich bin sechzehn Jahre alt. Und wie heißt du?

After German, we had history again, afterwards lunch and then English. It was very interesting, obviously, but we got a lot of homework. In history we had to write a biography in keywords about one of Henry's VIII wives. I chose Anne Boleyn. And in English we have to read the whole play in the next three weeks. And it is so long. And the way Shakespeare writes is just ugh. My head starts hurting after only reading a paragraph, how am I supposed to read the whole play? We also got the tasks we had to do in our project. We habe to read the whole play, of course, then write a summary, a short characterization of all important characters in keywords and a full characterization of one character of our choice. Then, each of us has to think of a question, which we have to answer in a researched analysis of the play. After the autumn holidays, we have to give our work to the teacher and she will grade it, so it counts as our first exam of the semester.

For the rest of the hour we talked in our groups about analysis questions and which we find interesting. I already have an idea what mine is: Was the death of Romeo and Juliet really necessary? This sounds kind of depressing, but I think there are a lot if arguments against it, as well as some counter arguments. And you don't have to research too much.

After English we had different project suggestions and we could elect one. I chose the history project. The election almost took an hour, but for the remaining time, we talked about what we would do in the project. The teacher is also Mrs Addams and she explained, that we can each or in small groups choose a historical movie or novel and after reading, find out how much of it is historically accurate. As homework we have to research on different movies and books we find interesting and choose one.

Then we were free to go home, where I ate lunch alone because Jem and Tessa were at the doctor to get Mina vaccinated. I also started reading the play and continued after they returned and Mina went to bed. And I lost track of time, so now it's 1:30 am and I started to think in Shakespeare-English. After I answered Tessa's question what I was doing with "Can thee not see?" and waving the script in front of her eyes, she laughed, but grabbed the paper and told me that I had definitely read enough for today and should go to bed.

So, that's what I will do now, hoping that I will dream of us. Not as Romeo and Juliet though. That would be even more traumatising than when we brought Livvy back to life. We don't want that right?

Love,

Kit

P.S. Whoops, now this entry got longer than I wanted it to be... well... it's 2:15. Future Kit will hate me in the morning.

Little announcement:

Firstly, happy new year, everyone!

Secondly, for the next weeks the updates may come irregularly because I have exam phase in university so I need to study a lot and don't have enough time and energy to write a lot. After February, the updates will probably be regularly again though, as I have holidays in March.

Thirdly, I have no idea how the British school system works, so I'm just making up my own, which is kind of a mix of British and German school system.

That's it. See you in the next update (hopefully next Monday). :-)