25/5/2005
Paper: English Literature
Expected Difficulty: Moderate -> Hard (depending on how clear the questions might be)
Actual Difficulty: Easier than I feared: question on "Of Mice And Men" covered a topic we'd already considered, and, although the type of questions about the poetry had changed, they were still recognisable and decipherable back to ideas I was familiar with.
Comments: Why do exam boards feel the need to change everything that works?
Paper: PE
Expected difficulty: Easy as falling off a sheep
Actual difficulty: Easy as falling off a sheep
Comments: As it was aptly described by Ben, a half hour exam crammed into an hour...
24/5/2005
Paper: Music
Expected Difficulty: Quite hard
Actual Difficulty: Fairly straight forward: on or two bits that didn't go as well, but I think generally OK.
Comments: Surprisingly nice music, even the serialist stuff was quite pleasant, and the gamelan, far from sounding (as it often does) like someone threw a percussion section down stairs, was really rather top hole.
23/5/2005
Well, that's one down:
Paper: Spanish Listening
Expected difficulty: Unsure - not quite certain how much spanish I've learnt and how much I've just sat around trying to concentrate while being bored out of my mind
Actual Difficulty: Not too bad: they spoke slower than I was expecting, which is always helpful. However, it is hardly too reassuring when, at the end of proceedings, your teacher tells you it was a really easy paper...
Overall: Fairly boring, which not only follows the trend for spanish, but also suggests it was quite easy and therefore I done OK
21/5/2005
Sorry about the 3 weeks off - a lot of revision, then sleep, to be done. Yesterday was the last day of year 11, and everything and nothing has changed... People I may never see again, some of whom I'll miss. In theory never having to enter an educational establishment again, were it not for the fact that, after being moved up a year I am actually below school leaving age, so I *think* I'm obliged to attend 6th form. And, of course, the 1 weekend of "study leave" (ha ha) - I don't know why we have been denied the few weeks that past year groups seem to have had in which to revise, all I know is that the day after tomorrow is my first exam, and the beginning of a week with 7.
What was weirdest about yesterday, was that for five years we have been desperate for it all to be over, but then we cried - and cried a lot. Not just because for that one day our teachers had been kind and fun, perhaps trying to make up for five years of sheer suicidal boredom. It was very strange to see how a feeling of such melancholy was manufactured, and to begin to see how, in 20 years I will think of these as the best days of my life. Which is really sad, since every day I woke up hoping against hope that it was actually the weekend, or snowing, or an inset day, so that I could avoid the daily grind of spanish, PE, biology.
Now its all over.
- No more spanish
- No more biology
- No more PE
- No more suicidal boredom (until next year)
- And now for something completely different: EXAM STRESS, YAY!!!
Now I must leave you, and revise some more.
1/5/2005
I've been pretty frantic over the past couple of weeks, as virtually every subject wanted another piece of coursework in by the next day... however, it seems that their deadline from the exam board has more or less passed, so there wont be any more of that nonsense.
Had my first actual exam on Friday - my spanish speaking. I should first state that spanish is. far and away, the most tedious, poorly taught subject I have ever had the displeasure of attending. I wont go into the wider issue of whether it's even worth us learning foreign languages now, cos it'll overtake this post.
Surprisingly, even the Spanish dept. want me to get an A*, so I made certain efforts, including burning a CD of the presentation which I was to give in order to aid my memory. The presentation went OK, but my general discussion was very poor. However, that doesn't matter as it's spanish, and it does mean that:
"no tengo hablar espanol otra vez en mi vivo"
(I don't have to speak spanish again in my life).
As an added bonus, I got to do this to the CD afterwards:
Wonderful feeling, that...