Thursday 15 May 2008

"The word is on the Street that the English paper was brutal."


Well. I meant to post this yesterday but there was a certain football game going on so I got sidetracked. The part I wrote yesterday is in blue, the rest is from today.

Okay. So here I am. Sat in front of my computer screen talking to a very dear friend who in fact managed to calm my nerves a little just by talking to me, waiting on the game to start with my English revision glaring at me from my bed. Okay, so what idiot put the final on the same eve of the Higher English exam?! Sigh. Could be worse; I could be in Manchester.

Anyway, here's the game plan: I'm going in tomorrow with The Darkness Out There, Infelice and A Streetcar Named Desire as a back up. I'd love it if TDOT came up, questions have been I've been assured its a fairish safe bet. Infelice is alright, I know it well enough to twist it to fit any question. ASCND will do as a back up, even though it wont be great. As for the Close Reading, I cant wait to get that out of the way and see how much I'm relying on the essays. I quite like Close Reading, just hoping its not a daft couple of passages...

I'd best be off., I'm 90 minutes away from making sure I'm all set. Sigh, not feeling good about this exam at all.

Hmmm. You know how when you've worked hard in an exam and then when you come out of it, you immediately forget everything that you wrote? Well I've got that going on. I cant tell whether I've done good or not.. The Close Reading went fine -despite there being a 5 marker stuck in right at the end- and the passages were actually quite good. As for the essay questions... Nightmare!

There were NO questions at all on The Darkness Out There! Thankfully, flicking frantically to the Poetry section, I found a vague question I could mould to Infelice. So without looking at the other questions I barreled into it and 7 pages later I looked at the Drama section. Only one question sounded remotely like something that would fit so I quickly started on that one.

A further Blanche DuBois style mental crisis and 7 pages later, time was up and we left the Dance studio. Funnily enough that was when I started panicking most but I soon calmed down when other said they found it as equally hard and that a few had done the same questions as me.

What I hate most about English exams? I often find that when I'm writing timed essays in class, I usually gauge on how much I have to write by a certain point of a page, ie bottom of the second page for the second factor to start. I can't do this in the exam because they give us booklets that have huge margins and equally huge lines. Its unnerving, if you get me and halfway through I've no idea where I'm supposed to be or how much I've written. Do the booklets need to be like the jotters you got in Primary One? No. It's no help.

And as for the game last night... Well done to St Petersburg.

2 comments:

Liz O'Neill said...

Jemma - I am sure you did well. It does sound like a tough paper. Hope the other exams go well. It will be over sooner than you think. Chin up!

Jemma said...

I hope so, I really do. Sigh. It's left me feeling really negative about the whole thing though. Acht. Who knows, bring on August. :)

Hope all is well in MN!