Skip to main content

The inevitability of exams!

Exams are thrown at you as soon as you begin going to school. Don't get me wrong, I sincerely value my education and I enjoy learning but I strongly dislike exams. Since year 10 (since I was fourteen) I have either been learning things for exams, revising for them or actually doing them. The way we're assessed, I feel, is rather subjective to the examiner and plays to some people's talents and not others.

I find that if I am given a week or so I can right a substantially good essay, I will work hard at it and I won't hand it in late or unfinished. In exams, however, I panic and find it so hard to write stuff that is consistently good! I don't feel there is any strict criteria, so to speak, and it's hard to know what to do and what not to do. In all my AS subjects you have to know a hell of a lot of stuff (fair enough - it's AS level) but you have to have intricate and perfect phrasing and have to have extremely good essay writing skills, which I've had to work my bum off for!

The pressure, might I add, is also crap. Not from my parents, partly from school but mainly from life in general! If I don't do well then it's going to have an impact on what I do in the future and I find me self really struggling at  the moment. The support I have at home, at school and from people in general is brilliant - but it doesn't take away that blind panic I feel when I think of how behind I feel, of how I've sat in pretty much all my lessons this week and not been able to concentrate, of how my exams are so soon! It's terrifying!

I know I'll do fine if I work hard but when there are those concrete dates of hell looming, it can get a bit much sometimes and some things, such as jobs or social lives, have to give. But equally, these are things that we need to succeed in life and we have to have an escape sometimes, it's just difficult to find that balance sometimes.

Anyway, weird ranty-thing over. I hope all of you who are doing exams this Spring/Summer do well and may the odds be ever in your favour.


DFTBA <3

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"Teens don't read"

Earlier today Maureen Johnson pointed out that the view of "teens don't read" in the UK is deeply entrenched (which is a word that I now love  and had never heard before). As a teenager in the UK, the stigma around reading seems to be - to me - it's "uncool", it's "geeky", there "aren't any good books out there". I think the fact that a lot of teenagers in British schools are exposed to older literature or, perhaps, not that popular literature in lessons and forced into over-analysing and spending countless hours on 'what the author meant'. A point that was raised in this twitter discussion was that people didn't want to be seen reading, or didn't want to be seen reading certain books. It's made me realise that I never   ever ever  see people reading in the older years in my school ( ever ). Perhaps the odd year 7 (12 year old) or year 8 (13 year old) will read, but - from experience - they will probably be ...

Ask FML

Ask FM infuriates me. I'm not going to take a moral high-ground and say I've never asked a question on it, because that would be lying but it still makes me angry. (Note that you can in fact dislike something that you have partaken in previously...) I can understand the appeal to both asking and answering questions - yeah, it can get some good conversation going. What I don't understand is that those two people could have that perfectly civilised conversation about all those deep and meaningful questions without the anonymity. Furthermore, why does someone immediately think "oh, I'm bored I KNOW let's post a link to ask.fm on my facebook/twitter page"? If you're bored go and do talk to people (text, phone, family, skype DO IT), read a book, make a video, write a blog post. Why ask people ask you questions? I just... I guess I don't get it. I have seen people horrendously bullied on formspring and ask fm and yet they continue to allow themselv...

Ten books that have shaped my decade

As this decade draws to an end, I’ve decided to take a look back at the last ten years and see what books have truly impacted my life. Choosing these was hard – for one thing, I’ve read a lot of books (663 since 2011) and for another, it’s harder to distance yourself from the ones you’ve read most recently. Ask me in five years, and this list may have changed! Books have fundamentally shaped me, from the ages of 14 to 24. So much has changed, including myself. Without these books, times would have been darker, more difficult to overcome, and I definitely would have felt a lot more alone. Books have brought me closer to people, they’ve made me friends, they’ve given me something to talk (gush) about, and they’ve eaten up a whole lot of time and money (not one moment or penny do I regret!). This year I fell back in love with going to the library, a habit I seemed to forget to do as a teenager/young adult. I urge you to go there, see what they have waiting for you on the shelves (...