Butterflies, smiles and tears (From Times Series)

Results Day!

11:16pm Wednesday 25th August 2010

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Both AS, A level and GCSE results days have passed like a storm but believe me there was no calm before the grades came out. Different people react differently to the ‘moment of truth.’ For example a socialist in my college (me) would say: ‘These letters are nothing more then evaluations of us computerised humans to fit us in like jigsaws into the economy.’ But another more astute and less paranoid student (someone else) would say: ‘These grades could determine my future.’ Either way, most students were nervous.

As I made my way to college with my sister driving, she made every attempt to mock me for mocking her when her results came out. After getting to college, there was a short unexpected delay in collecting my results which made things worse. The outlandish conspiracy theorist student then said: ‘Nothing more then a bourgeoisie mind trick to delay the inevitable destruction of our souls through mindless capitalist labour.’ The other more level headed student just shrugged off the delay.

Butterflies are looming in most stomachs expect for those people who emptied their stomach butterflies via the local kebab shop. It seemed people were either crying or smiling as I looked around, like some sort of paradoxical/juxtaposed/contradictory land where people see each others emotions and do the exact opposite. For instance if one student was smiling the other student will frown in annoyance and if one student was crying tears of unhappiness another student was crying tears of happiness. But this was not ‘some sort of paradoxical/juxtaposed/contradictory land’, no it was results day.

At this point one will question the motive of a state which wishes to impose this reaction on 16/17/18 year olds. But the key is not to get overly happy or overly sad and become sort of monotone human being with no reaction. So rather then being a rainbow of happy or sad emotions become the rainbow’s arch enemy: grey. If it’s 4 A’s or 4 U’s produce that ‘not quite a smile, not quite a frown’ look and you’ll be fine.

Now that I have covered that crucial advice of dealing with opening your results I can go onto the whole point of writing this post. The issue I wanted to discuss was stress before veering off topic. If students realised that these grades ‘don’t define you.’ If you worked hard and still didn’t get what you deserved then it’s not the end. Unfortunately it’s drilled into our heads that failing exams is the end. I reiterate its not. Of course you can’t just mess around, work hard but don’t let stress overcome you like sort of adolescence version of the boogie monster except exam papers don’t have the capabilities to eat you (in fact YOU can eat an exam paper – I’m by no means advocating digesting exam papers by the way!)

I think at this point people will question my motive for writing this and will assume I wrote it because I failed. Well I will not reveal whether I did well or not to create some sort of ‘end of the blog’ crescendo. Hopefully you will not lose sleep in wondering what my grades were, if you do contact me and I’ll tell you!