Not-so-distant, not-so-difficult mornings
It's strange how things can appear much more difficult while you're worried. Take my Maths exam, for example, the first paper, non-calculator, as it was the easier of the two. But, of course, while I'm sitting there looking it over for the first time, there were several questions that looked nigh-on impossible. I would panic for a minute then move on to the next question. Maybe a couple of questions later, I'd come to the next tricky one and leave that.
There were eleven questions in all, some divided into (a), (b), etc. By the time I reached the end of the paper, I thought I'd have to go back and do more than half the questions over again. As it turned out, there were just three. One which I knew how to do but couldn't be bothered doing at the time, one that was simple enough upon closer inspection and one which, having gone through the working along a different route, turned out to be right, just with an odd answer.
The same went for the second paper, which I felt was harder but I'm not getting into that until August.
Things are very rarely as bad as they seem. They may sometimes be worse than they appear, but the advantage of pessimism is that they tend to be better than you first assume.
Curiously, after the exam, I could distinctly recall most of my answers, which I recounted to other people, whose answers were often far from similar, in order to come to some democratic consensus on what was the right answer.
Now, less than twelve hours later, and the whole experience is like a half-remembered dream. The same applies to exams I sat last year, and the prelims earlier in this one, albeit on a greater level. I cannot for the life of me remember any questions from my Standard Grade Physics exam, but I can clearly recall wandering down to GameStation with two friends in order to buy a T-shirt and a copy of Retro Gamer in-between the General and Credit papers.
If you asked me to summarise May of last year, all I would know about school was that I had exams but I could easily speak of time spent at the little playpark along the seafront, watching friends try to run on that odd, tilted spinning disc. I think it may have been after my German exam that I went into Seafield Stores to buy about twenty tubes of Smarties.
As important as they may be, it seems that exams aren't actually interesting enough for my mind to keep track of them.
There were eleven questions in all, some divided into (a), (b), etc. By the time I reached the end of the paper, I thought I'd have to go back and do more than half the questions over again. As it turned out, there were just three. One which I knew how to do but couldn't be bothered doing at the time, one that was simple enough upon closer inspection and one which, having gone through the working along a different route, turned out to be right, just with an odd answer.
The same went for the second paper, which I felt was harder but I'm not getting into that until August.
Things are very rarely as bad as they seem. They may sometimes be worse than they appear, but the advantage of pessimism is that they tend to be better than you first assume.
Curiously, after the exam, I could distinctly recall most of my answers, which I recounted to other people, whose answers were often far from similar, in order to come to some democratic consensus on what was the right answer.
Now, less than twelve hours later, and the whole experience is like a half-remembered dream. The same applies to exams I sat last year, and the prelims earlier in this one, albeit on a greater level. I cannot for the life of me remember any questions from my Standard Grade Physics exam, but I can clearly recall wandering down to GameStation with two friends in order to buy a T-shirt and a copy of Retro Gamer in-between the General and Credit papers.
If you asked me to summarise May of last year, all I would know about school was that I had exams but I could easily speak of time spent at the little playpark along the seafront, watching friends try to run on that odd, tilted spinning disc. I think it may have been after my German exam that I went into Seafield Stores to buy about twenty tubes of Smarties.
As important as they may be, it seems that exams aren't actually interesting enough for my mind to keep track of them.
posted by Alasdair Corbett at
11:01 PM
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