Fear of Exams

Bai Goanna checked with some book on English grammar called ‘Wren and Martin’ and let me know that a student took an examination and a teacher gave it. Always thought it was the other way around. I’m sometimes wrong. To distract her, I said, “These days, the full word ‘examination’ is used only in government and other out-dated communications.” Ignoring the distraction, she continued: “A doctor gives a patient an examination, a structural engineer gives a bridge an examination, an art-historian gives an antique statue an examination…” you get the idea, when Bai Goanna talks, she gives a full lecture. This topic came up because she was assuring me that I wasn’t the only one who got nightmares about being in an exam-centre staring at a printed question paper, making no sense of anything in/on it. She said her nightmares included running out of ink, not finding the pen/ruler/eraser, missing the bus and therefore reaching just as the papers were being collected and worst of all, getting a mathematics paper when she’d prepared for geography/English. Had to agree, her nightmares were worse than mine. Mine are restricted to not knowing the answers and fearing the red line on the report-card with an ‘F’ marked somewhere. I know people who get stomach upsets, loss of appetite, sweaty palms, dizzy heads, a craving to eat forbidden snacks/sweets or a sudden/illogical wish to see Radhika Apte (or Fawhad) hours before exams are due to begin. A few, a really small percentage, feel like meeting their teachers/tutors/principals to seek blessings and stuff. Rare breed. Those kinds regularly do their homework on time through the year, have ‘difficulties’ two evenings before every unit test and ‘last-minute’ notes to revise. I shudder to even imagine what their nightmares are like. For theirs is the tension, the (they and their parents believe) power and the glory, forever and ever, amen. Poor things. At least one can wake up from a nightmare and heave a sigh of relief. Before every paper I’ve ever taken, I’ve prayed to each god I had heard of, irrespective of religion. I’ve even prayed to ancestors of classmates to intervene on my behalf and make me magically know the answers to simple and trick questions. The mantra of students before exams, like the belief of visitors in ICUs and participants in Kaun Banega Karodpati, is: ignore no god however insignificant, offend none, please all. Who knew which one would/could benevolently provide easy questions/answers/marks? Before an exam, goes the rule, never take punga with Luck. Charms work, they say: small lockets dangled from the neck, marbles in pencil-boxes, frayed ‘blessed’ threads tied to wrists, photos of Mary/Saraswati tucked into pockets, ash/dried flowers from places of worship put into pencil-boxes, etc. In the tea-time of my life, I’ve got involved with exams again, this time from the other side of The Desk. Never had I imagined that I would be giving an exam. Never mind in what subject and which institution. I had to evaluate the very lot of students that I’d taught. Scary thought, that they might have taken everything I’d said seriously. I had to sift between Very Good, Good, Fair, Satisfactory and Fail. I had to set questions, give marks, calculate grades, ranks. Made me nervous. My regard for my old physics/chemistry teachers (may their souls be resting in The Great School in the Sky), spiked when I reckoned how much time/effort they spent trying to appraise what we’d learnt in their classes. Like me, they must have wondered, were my/their lesson plans clear? Methods effective? As students, my friends’ and my days were spent in a haze of clever jokes. We didn’t have sms/whatsapp; we had our own means of triggering giggles. Technology changes, human nature doesn’t. Daydreams were fantastic escapes from the tedium of formulae and theories. I wondered how much of what I had slogged over had been retained by the students. If it was >5%, I’d give myself a party. As a teacher, I think differently. I went through the syllabus prescribed as well as the syllabus I’d covered, delved through topics/chapters which I thought were important, to dig questions from. I rearranged words to make simple questions look complicated, to get the young minds a-creaking. Then I sat down to decide how many marks to allot to each question. I said to Bai Goanna: “This exercise of setting a paper is an exam of sorts for me. I don’t know what to include and what to leave out.” I’m not into CBTs (Closed Book Tests), but they’re essential. Everything can’t be copied/downloaded from the internet. Brains must be used sometimes. I threw in an essay. The topic: “Me, Five Years from Now”. Mean teachers give mean topics. In my class, the vocal ones chorused: “Give us hints. Tell us, tell us, Miss, ‘what will come’.” “No,” I said, my voice sounding unfamiliarly stern even to my own ears. “Everything is equally important.” Words imbibed in childhood stay in the memory, at the back of the mind, to be recalled in times like these. As the day of the examination approached, I got the jitters. What if the class didn’t turn up? What if it did but I couldn’t find my sheaf? What if a large number of students submitted nearly-blank sheets? What if the paper was so easy that everyone scored a hundred per cent marks? What if my grading wasn’t fair? What if there was a re-exam for whatever reason? What if… the nightmares continued, the perspective had changed. It’s ordained, in the field of education, that a taker of exams someday a giver shall become. These days, male teachers are rare. In my schooldays, there was equal gender distribution. Our female teachers wore skirts, even short and smart ones, or saris. The salwar-kameez was a no-no. “It’s the tension of giving an exam that has brought to your mind this irrelevant, unconnected, long forgotten ‘fact’,” Bai Goanna said. Maybe. Feedback: sheelajaywant@yahoo.co.in