I NOTICE during the current fine spell that young ones are stravaging about the town during school hours looking preoccupied and hot in their school uniform.
Of course! It’s exam season. Unpleasant memories come lurching back.
Exam weather – the best two or three weeks of May and June are spent sweltering in examination halls wishing I’d paid better attention in class, applied myself more assiduously to revision, or, at the very least, prayed harder. Too late.
Feeling already condemned felons we trail in our trial, abandoning hope at the door and taking our places at desks laid out in regimental rows.
The sun beats in through the tall windows, casting trembling leaf-shadows of the big sycamore tree outside.
Bluebottles buzz impotently against the glass, desperate to escape. As are we.
An anonymous and impersonal invigilator reads out a lengthy list of rules and sanctions and pronounces our death sentence. “You may now turn over your papers.”
It doesn’t matter what the subject is, the questions might as well be printed in Sanskrit. There’s always somebody who faints.
Then silence, but for the inexorable ticking of the clock. The dust-motes dance in the sunbeams, the hair is damp on the nape of the neck.
There’s not even a drink of water. The invigilator patrols the aisle like a prison warder with a creak in one shoe.
Row upon row of heads, bent under the weight of parental expectation, are diligently scribbling and scribbling.
The Hanseatic League; the industrial development of the Ruhr; Gerard Manley Hopkins and his accursed ‘sprung rhythm’; if a herring and a half cost three ha’pence, how many peas in a barrel of grapes?
Six or seven years of secondary education regurgitating onto paper – pass or fail. No second chances. Reprieved, we slink out, lie about how we got on and resign ourselves gloomily to the day of reckoning and results.
But what a palaver is made of the examination system today. Parental angst and child trauma begin early.
The 11-plus may no longer be with us, but is replaced by entrance tests for specific grammar schools – thus ensuring the lucrative private tuition business continues and ten-year-olds’ holidays are blighted by practice papers.
It’s still many parents’ ambition to hothouse their son or daughter into a grammar school blazer. Some poor little blighters are put forward for as many as four tests.
And on the day, it only takes one unwitting parent to betray their anxiety and their infected child carries it into school, where it runs through the whole group, as smittal as chickenpox.
It doesn’t get any better further up the education ladder. ‘O’ and ‘A’ level students are given generous study leave.
The public press offers a plethora of advice on revision plans, study breaks, diet, hydration, sleep and ‘pamper evenings’. I note one recommendation.
“Compile your revision background music tape.” What?! In our day it was: “Turn off that racket and get into that bedroom and don’t come out till you’ve learned it.”
From what I gather, many spend their revision time online discussing how little they’ve done or exchanging texts, winding each other up to the point of hysteria.
In the examination hall, the incidence of meltdown increases – tears, nausea, panic attacks. The aftermath is a sobfest or shrieking delirium.
Results day brings a reprise of this performance, with coverage by the local media focusing on pogo-ing clusters of high-fliers garlanded with well-deserved ‘A’ stars – the academic world their oyster.
For the rest, there’s a multiplicity of options never available to us, their elders, though many choose not to take them and never develop their full potential.
They say people who are good at passing exams are good at passing exams, which is both grudging and unfair, but how are creativity, imagination, talent, business acumen and other skills measured?
Many of our inventors, entrepreneurs, sports stars, artists, actors and musicians confess to being dunderheads at school. Success in any field is bred of aptitude, commitment and hard graft.
When you’re successful and fulfilled in doing what you’re best at, who’s going to remember your exam results?
