Archive for May, 2008
The destructive power of exams
For many years I loved it when exams came around. They were a lot more fun than normal lessons for me (easier and nice when completed) and so I loved them through primary school all the way up to Y9 SATs. The main reason they were so much fun was that revision, if it existed at all, was minimal and so I could enjoy the whole atmosphere. I love the clacking of the invigilator’s shoes (obviously I only got this once I got to secondary school), the ticking clock, the scratching of pens. But while I can still appreciate these and the whole exam zone now, they are no longer my favourite time of the year. I have joined the ranks of Everyone Else in dreading exams coming along, and why? For three simple reasons: having to revise, and because the exams matter, and because I can’t just get high marks easily anymore.
It has of course been increasingly in the news of late that school pupils in this country are thought to be seriously over-tested, and for a long time I didn’t think this was an issue because actually, people around me did realise when the tests mattered and when they didn’t. But I’ve realised this is no longer the case, or I was ignorant to others in the past. My sister has recently done her Y9 SATs at the age of fourteen, and in the run up to this became incredibly worked up. She did hours and hours of revision, she worried about them, she struggled through past exam papers. I told her multiple times that this didn’t make sense, that the exams mattered only for the school and not the individual at this stage. But she insisted that they decided her set for GCSE and thus she must do as well as possible. To me it seems highly probably that an unfair image has been impressed upon her by her teachers and realistically if she didn’t get what she was capable of then they would surely set her appropriately for the next year. It is unreasonable to make a yeargroup of children feel this way about something that is so insignificant.
But that is about an exam that doesn’t matter, and obviously my AS level modules do. Revision and exams though have really spoilt in many ways my lower sixth year. Consider my subject of History. For most of secondary school it was my absolute favourite subject, above even maths, and it was only superceded by RE (religious education) during the latter part of GCSE when I gained my present philosophy teacher for this subject, who made RE into a philosophy lesson in many ways. But as GCSE exams drew closer and once I started this year I have come to almost hate it; it has caused many hours of misery. This is because I cannot enjoy the subject when I am continuously having to think about how whatever exercise or reading I am doing is going to help me with my exams. When I read something academic that isn’t for school, it’s wonderously enjoyable and I can get a lot out of it. But that ceases to be the case once you bring in the fact that I need to get an A in this subject to go to the university I want to go to.
In addition to this I am useless at revision, and am useless at keeping pure knowledge in my head. I can think of the ideas, I can debate the bigger picture and get to the heart of the matter. But I can’t remember the date Hitler became Chancellor of Germany or when the first Jews were gassed at Auschwitz without a lot of effort. And of course as seems to be the case with most people I have lots of useless (for exam purposes, there we go again: an eternal focus) knowledge floating around in my head. I can still sing through the vast majority of Les Misérables, for example. So I get more and more worked up about how I can’t revise and am never going to keep it in my head, and then I get unworked up by the fact that I do actually seem to remember more than others and in any case one always remembers more in the actual exam once in the zone. But it still makes my life unpleasant in the run up to the day.
So I hope that I have demonstrated how in my life, exams seem to have great destructive power. They stop me from exploring subjects, they become the sole focus (I hate myself when I ask teachers, “right, which bit of this do I need to know for the exam” but I know I can’t remember it all). At the heart of all this is the fact that I am far too bothered about getting to the university I want to go to and thus concentrate so much energy and thought into those grades. I try not to judge myself as a person based on exam results, but that doesn’t stop me continually checking that my academic path, which I may not even get onto anyway, is not hindered in anyway by the way my work is focussed.
You may have observed that I’ve made two changes to this blog lately. Firstly, I changed the design yesterday because I was getting annoyed with the fact that my posts looked shorter than they are because they aren’t in the thin column they are now; this also makes them easier to read. Secondly, I’m posting more regularly and more, er, personally; it’s becoming more like a diary than a logbook. Hopefully this will make my posts more pleasant and interesting to read, for the few people that do.
First, and possibly last, blood donation
A friend at school altruistically organised a trip to the blood donation centre in town as we are now mostly old enough to go, so I went down this morning to donate. Apparently 6% of people who can donate do, which I thought could be seen as either high or low depending on how you looked at it. So I duly went in and had a perfectly successful blood test for iron content, and went to the table. Despite it taking a bit to get going (the donor carer stabbed the wrong place and a fountain of blood sprayed over the arm rest etc., to which I looked on bemused), I filled the unit of blood quite happily in eight minutes, below the average of ten minutes. However, it was when I sat up slowly that things started to go wrong. After feeling absolutely fine, I felt dizzy and said so, fortunately meaning that when I then fainted, someone caught me. Fainting, which has happened to me once before, is a very strange experience. I find myself thinking something through and probably thinking up some strange theory, and then suddenly it feels vaguely like I’ve just woken up from a dream or just started a dream and I have absolutely no idea where I am for several seconds; it is very strange not knowing where you are. The first thing I said was ‘did I just faint?’ as realisation dawned.
The nurse then told me that it was worth coming back, but if that were to happen again then I am not someone who should be giving blood at all, simply put. After spending what was probably an hour or so recovering in total I left for lunch out with my grandparents, but I’m still not feeling fantastic. I’m not at all used to being so unalert and not quite with it – this doesn’t happen to me, I don’t get ill! I think with regard to donating again I may well give it another go, but if there are problems then then I am helping them to create patients, not save them. Ah well, such is life.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
In the past month I’ve got to know a new friend (who I’m very jealous of as she has a much more eloquent, thoughtful and regularly-updated blog than mine) because I’ve discovered someone who agrees with my views on the foolishness of many emotions, particularly the way in which so much of society is these days putting emotional ‘wellbeing’ far too high on their list of priorities. Her and I proposed and won ‘[t]his house believes that society should get over its collective emotional hang up’ a few weeks ago and while our views are probably stronger than this they are also in so many ways hypocritical so this thrust was the safest argument to have a shot at. My friend has from time to time in our (hopefully) philosophical conversations referred to a favourite book of hers, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and so last week I asked to borrow it and see if it is as good as she made out. And it had an immense effect on me as it seems to have had on her (facebook gives me the impression this happens, or you find it dull – one or the other). So last Friday evening I rediscovered ‘binge reading’; I haven’t been unable to put a book down in that way for quite some time. The book is very well-written and has a poignant and involving story, so I could enjoy it for that alone but in addition there were some particular parts and lines that made some big and very fundamental philosophical arguments. Unlike most books I read I finished it satisfactorily and didn’t want it to go on. It wasn’t a perfectly happy ending, but it was a complete ending. I would definitely recommend it as something everyone should read.
One of the big points raised was whether what one has in life is enough, whether it is okay to just be content with what you have. I’m not talking materially here. At one point in the book, which is written as a series of letters from the main character Charlie to an anonymous friend, Charlie considers a conversation he has had with a group of friends in a cafe-type place. The discussion is on celebrity culture as I recall and so it’s not something trivial; the group are being political about it. And he sits back and notes how the very same conversation has been had, with variations, by so many groups of friends in so many meeting places through time and space. Charlie says that this doesn’t matter, that this is okay, and it makes him feel comfortable to be repeating this situation with those he loves. I struggle somewhat to accept this. Is it meaningful to do something if it has been done before? It seems to me that something becomes less and less meaningful the more times it happens. Lately (since before I read the book) I have been observing people in a similar way to Charlie and questioning whether their lives have any worth as they bring up children and laugh and eat ice cream or whatever. Why do it? The premise here that allows it all to work is if we accept happiness and human contentment to be something to be maximised. But I take issue with this. Surely we are something more than that?
In keeping with this I have for some years held the view that learning and understanding should be the human race’s goal in order to work out without simply accepting if this idea of creating happiness is what we should do and aim for. Of late I have become particularly concerned with philosophy as something that has far less assumptions, and challenges those, compared with other disciplines – this concern and focus is likely to change with time, as always. But unfortunately I can’t contribute to this as well as I would like to. I’m afraid of what will happen when I finish education in the sense of getting to the end of university. What will I do? I can’t imagine stopping and going into a ‘career’. This of course may well change but all I seem to want to do at the moment is learn and understand. My friend thinks that you don’t need to look at the bigger picture and just need to concentrate on the step of the staircase you are on – but what if you are on the wrong staircase and don’t notice?
As you can probably see from these ramblings, I’m not entirely conclusive on this argument and of course that is hardly surprising given that I am contemplating the unanswerable question of the meaning of life. I intend to read the book again in a few months so I will maybe have another go then: the question that remains is whether it matters that everything one has done will have been done before. The idea is of a sense of mediocrity, of living a life that has been lived a thousand times before. I don’t think I could ever be happy (ha, see?) with doing that though I suspect that I will just fit another of these stereotypes, despite trying to fool myself for most of my life into thinking that I’m being original.
Another concept that was brought up in the book was an idea of a feeling of being infinite. In the book there are moments when Charlie and his friends are doing something together and he merely describes it as being infinite in the moment; he doesn’t illustrate any more than this. I suspect that we have all had this at some point. My friend says that this is one of her goals in life, to experience this infinity rather than happiness, and one of the reasons I wanted to read the book was to try and understand why she craves this ‘walking bare foot on cold tiles’ feeling. She says that it is about feeling insignificant and human and ordinary – but feeling that this doesn’t matter. But I would argue that this infinity, while nice, is merely in fact another version of happiness. An artist can cry about a powerful painting and claim that they are not being simply happy about seeing it, but why do they go back and look again? Because it makes them feel happy to do so, on some level. They are happy about the fact that the painting makes them feel sad. Despite this I’m going to bear infinity in mind from now on and try and notice if it happens to me. The book raised the concept well and this is another reason why I like it.
The books title refers to the fact that the main character is a wallflower socially in the sense that they don’t participate, as the book puts it, as much as the average person. The way in which this is described is very cleverly done. I asked myself whether I fit this title or not but if I do, I only just do because while the wallflower goes to the dance and doesn’t dance (this is coming from the literal definition of the term), I just stay at home. But for a long time I have been proud of the fact that I engage with others only really intellectually and rarely have aimless conversations. So then maybe I am an observer, and I can take some strange pride or happiness from that. The problem with the book in terms of trying to relate to it is that it has a main character that dabbles in all sorts of drugs and alcohol, which of course I stay away from entirely (I don’t even drink coffee). Regardless though I think I’ll use this adjective to describe my aloof position in the future. I can lounge in the strange superiority as I usually do with my arrogance.
So as if obvious from this post, this book has given me a lot to think about. I’m not sure that these various thoughts flying through my head are in fact not simply what every seventeen year old is supposed to do when considering the rest of their lives, and in fact I’m being entirely unoriginal. But I do like to record these things on this blog, which no-one reads, so that I can look back in the future on the futility of it all. Regardless, this book is definately in my top five, and I reiterate: read it, it’s well worth hunting down a copy. Sorry for the unorthadox way of reviewing it.
Xanga Featured Question: What is the greatest life lesson you’ve learned so far?
Xanga Featured Question: What is the greatest life lesson you’ve learned so far?
Many accuse me of lacking practical wisdom in the sense that I’m not fantastic at getting practical things done in this apparently existent world. I don’t always see the most efficient route to solving problems and on top of this am often accused of being too frank and honest and should sometimes temper my words. To the former I accept a regular display of ineptitude, but to the latter I think I cut through the emotional nonsense that often prevails and in those cases I do get things done more efficiently than others. I say what I mean and what I am thinking when it’s helpful. One thing I am trusting my family to have informed me correctly on is that I apparently over-exaggerate somewhat – I honestly don’t see myself doing it so I’ve taken to actually warning people this is thought of me after telling them something where I might have unintentionally done so. Otherwise the life’ lessons’ than I am accused of needing to learn I don’t think I have because I don’t see any particular need to. However of late I have realised a few things about myself which are useful in avoiding embarrassing mistakes.
First of all I’ve realised that I’m gullible. I take what people say on face value because I pride myself on the fact that people can take what I say as being true since I don’t lie. I need to question more than I do: I need to check things that sound potentially exaggerated with others, I need to read other opinions rather than the limited scope I do. So many times I have been caught out by people’s tales, examples of which I’m not going to go into here, and this is really not constructive. So I am trying to stop myself from accepting viewpoints without double-checking them against other reliable sources. I need to do this for politics, philosophy and simply people’s experiences.
Secondly, it’s been pointed out to me by my Mother that I’m far more changeable with regard to interests and opinions than it may at first seem (and I accepted the latter view that I’m pretty firm). I’m not talking about open-mindedness here which I do believe I have these days. I’m told that I always appear self-assured and supremely confident when, for example, speaking at debating but actually I’m constantly moving around. It’s a bit difficult to quite get across what I mean here, so let me give an example. I seem to swing back and forth between my respect for academic disciplines. For example, I’ve been looking up great Macbeth quotes this week and have lamented my poor GCSE English teaching for putting me off words. Recently I’ve denounced Physics as clutching at empirical straws and my deputy head recently commented to my father outside of school that I’m far more of a philosopher than a mathematician. I’m inclined to agree with this: I seem to be sliding over to the humanities a lot more. But then I look back a year ago and it was the complete opposite; I had very little interest in subjects outside maths and science. So the lesson learnt here is that I need to be very careful making such broad attacks upon areas of school as I may well change my opinion later. My mother’s example was a swing of obsessions between computing, ringing, reading etc.
Thirdly, I’ve realised that I seem to have something of an inferiority complex. I hate the fact that I constantly try to find ways in my head to put myself above other people. I’m not the best! I recognise and accept that. But I still find myself trying to justify some kind of superiority on all sorts of grounds. What I’ve tried to tell myself is that I am open-minded and think things through and thus any other abilities are unimportant: as Dumbledore said, one’s choices and not one’s abilities define a person. But I really do struggle to get over this psychological situation and I need to avoid this. Even now for example I am considering the fact that the blog of a friend has so much better posts than mine. It comes down to jealousy at the end of the day and all I can do is force myself not to think in these ways. It just wastes time. I need to accept that actually most of the people around me at school are more intelligent and do have better arguments. Why can’t I? I don’t know. Silly biology.
Fourthly, recently I have been actually noticing the vast numbers of people actually on this planet. It is incredible to think how small and insignificant any one of us is. There are so many other people, so many other thoughts cycling around. So in tandem with the above I need to keep this in my head, I need to realise more readily that our petty debates are so small and minor. Our ideas are tiny in the grand scheme of this world, and miniscule on the scale of the scientific universe. I have a friend who is of the opinion that a feeling of insignificance and coldness, of being a human tossed and turned upon the waves of fate, which is the best way to describe it here, is in fact her sole goal in terms of finding any kind of meaning in life (sorry L, I’ve probably misrepretented you here). I don’t think I agree with this, but it makes a point about how small we all are. The Internet again shows the vast numbers involved: thousands of blogs created every day, thousands of more intelligent comments posted.
So the above is things that I have realised recently about myself and I would argue that these are the most important life lessons I have learnt so far. I think I’ll need to reanswer this question in a few years, but right now what is the greatest? The fact that I have learnt to be open-minded, I do believe, and that I *should* be at peace with myself for making what I believe to be the right choices.