Yes, I find myself saying this, and other positive statements of world worth, after Yesterday.
Because we can now tick another Experience Box. Exams. Tiger and Squirrel sat the first part of an IGCSE Chemistry exam, and Shark blew up her IGCSE Geography, scattering corpses in her wake.
Strictly speaking, Squirrel did not actually, knowingly, sit her exam. I drove her to a sports hall in a school that looked like a Corporate Headquarters, maybe Corporate Admin Supplies Ltd, and I deposited her into the indifferent care of an invigilator while Squirrel's face bore a puzzled look of Exam? What is that? Am I sitting an exam? But how? I am standing up! And what is this thing, exam?
But Squirrel has a winning way of looking simultaneously charming / deluded / off-her-face / bewildered / dream-filled / hapless - all achieved while smiling, so you forgive her all, and I hope the invigilator put a pen on her desk, and I also hope Squirrel picked it up sometime while the clock did that turny-hand-thing.
Tiger, well, she surprised us all. I thought at the mention of the word exam - in fact any word that begins with the letter e and possibly has an e in it - that this would provoke the most enormous, wallpaper-chewing meltdown, where the family barricaded ourselves quivering in the cellar, calling the helicopter police to tasar her on the rampage.
Astonishingly, Tiger determined the letter A should follow the word exam and she's gone for it, having spent the last 28,000 hours with her face stuck in 450 Chemistry books. I wish her well.
Shark? What can I say, except it could be a race to last place.
We had an almighty fight about the IGCSE Geography last month - a fallen angels and rising devils sort of argument - which helped not. Shark since then spurned my generous advice about diagrams and how to hold a ruler over a river. Then, while a misplaced sense of confidence settled into Shark's exam preparation (whatever form that took), the bastards changed the exam specification, probably while I was sulkily staring into a notebook for cuddles and consolation. The upshot was, Shark had to approach the experience with the heroic daring of an Eddie-the-Eagle style assault. I expect she can resit, sometime after she has actually read the chapter on rivers.
Then yes, failure is a form of success, because it is not a failure to experience. Experience is only ever, success.
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2 comments:
A life spent making mistakes is better than a life spent doing nothing. Saw that in a shop today. Hugs. I hate gcses and exams and have enjoyed not having any this year. Saw from the exams list that others got caught out by the geography spec change too :-(. I'm a wee bit anxious about English as I think next summer is the last for this spec so if she needs to resit, it will be learning from the beginning all over again. I really must try and find the time to double check it all before she starts properly on it in sept.
You have my sympathy. After the insanity of the Art exam (the mention of which makes me tremble), and the cramming for biology, only to realise that the exam syllabus has completely shifted to application of knowledge (so you learn human biology and then find a parakeet or hamster on your exam paper) I am wrung out. And now, a 3 week wait until the second biology paper. What?!
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