“Noooooooooo! James for the last time: I do not know where your revision notes are! I haven’t seen them at all and I expect they are where ever you left them!”. At this point I want to scream and throw a hissy fit. I am pulling my hair out. James has roughly ten days left before his school pulls the plug on childhood and drags all his year through the agony of GCSE exams. He is totally unprepared for this life experience. He is drifting ever closer to the abyss and could soon be teetering on its cusp, ready for a fall. However he remains completely calm, cool and collected. Whilst his parents on the other hand will soon be candidates for a Care in the Community order.
I have taken to stalking him when he returns from school. I creep up on him when he is on the computer ready to screech and wail and berate his lack of activity on the revision front. Thus far, though, I have been thwarted. On several occasions I have been met by a screen that purports to be about science revision and has happy little people marching in and out of rooms, demanding the answer to a complicated set of questions. This, accompanied by much laughter and merriment and my teenage son, far from lying with his head buried in his hands whilst he recants several theories, is actually laughing out loud. Punching out answers on the keyboard which are then met with frenzied jumping up and down of presenters and big Wahoo’s! and Well Dones!
I don’t recall ever having fun revising for any of my exams. Misery and worry were my only companions, as I stayed upstairs in my cold dank bedroom, gnawing at my fingernails. I can remember that feeling of exclusion and isolation as the noise of family life filtered upstairs, mocking me in my self imposed exile. I never really learnt anything either, as I was too busy trying to disguise the sound of the Top Twenty blaring out of my portable radio. I spent hours practising writing my signature as it would be if I ever married Martin or was it Michael? I also discovered a passion for clothes design and used copious paper from all my revision notebooks, drawing styles of which, Stella McCartney would be proud. Occasionally, I could even fit in a long and extended session of crying and beating my pillow. Shouting at the unfairness of life, that I should have to be stuck in front of piles of books. I would then phone my best friend and again spend several soggy hours crying with worry about the forthcoming exams. It didn’t really leave much time for revision.
James on the other hand though, does not segregate himself from the rest of the family. He sits back on the chair in front of the computer, in the sitting room, whizzing from one web page to the next. Laughing and humming away to himself. Occasionally, he reaches over to flick through a text book, underlines something and then continues to tap on the keys, nodding his head in time with the music playing on the uploaded CD. This cannot surely be revision? Where is the angst, the worry and the stomping from room to room?
I can’t believe that life has changed so much that the pressures of exams have dissipated so much, that actually it causes no level of anxiety.
Yet as I watch my child take on the routines of life and living in this time, I realise that in one sense he has begun to grow and mature. In comparison to how I handled the weight of exam pressure, he has simply put it in order of importance in his life. It may still prove to be that he has got it wrong, and the learning curve will be a steep one. He may, indeed, need to reassess how much work is needed in preparation, but he has already gained one very essential skill in life. He has put it into perspective. Studying is important, but it is not, in his eyes, the only thing happening in his life at the moment.
And you know, I have to admire that……but I still wish he would put his stuff away so that he could find it next time!!!