You may now turn over your paper …

Up and down the country, thousands of students will be lining up alphabetically, filing into exam halls, sitting at desks with a see-through pencil case and bottle of water with the label taken off (no chance for cheating by writing answers on a label!), waiting patiently while an invigilator walks up and down the rows of desks handing out exam papers.  Sitting there with the paper face down, while the clock slowly clicks round to 9am and those final words are spoken.  It’s a busy time of year for staff as well as students, and when I tiptoe past the hall on my way back to the exams office, I still get ‘that’ feeling in the pit of my stomach as I sympathise with the students inside whose futures depend on those results. 

It’s also a time for kids to become more accident prone.  The number of students who have come to us with sprained wrists, twisted ankles, broken fingers etc asking for us to apply for special consideration on their behalf.  Parents ring up with the strangest requests for us to let the exam board know that ‘xxx has taken a cold relief tablet this morning and may become sleepy’ or ‘ their hamster died at the weekend and they are still very upset and couldn’t revise properly’.  Trust me, we have heard them all.  It’s a time for sensible shoes as we try to walk silently down the corridor between the hall and the rest of the school.  It’s funny how shoes which walk quietly in town become noisy in the hall and I am frequently seen kicking off my shoes as I enter the corridor and walking barefoot down the link!  It’s a time for kids to over react and our poor head of sixth form is fast becoming more of an ‘agony aunt’ with a constant supply of boxes of tissues and sympathy for those who come out of an exam positive that ‘I’ve failed, I know I have, what am I going to do?’  Speaking as a parent whose kids have gone through all this, I know it from that side of the story too and I know how we worry on their behalf and try to keep positive and encouraging, force feeding healthy food and trying to keep them well for the weeks of the exams. 

So on a lighter note, let me share a layout I made to remember the day that our daughter moved out of home and into a flat with her boyfriend.  Seems like only yesterday she was one of those stressful students …