Exam stress? What exam stress?

I have a feeling that Scottish school pupils are sitting their English SQA exams today. If not, it was yesterday - we retired teachers become quite hazy about these once crucial dates - and, incidentally, I'd be fascinated to see what the new English exam paper looked like, if anyone reading this can tell me. But the discussion on the radio took me further back, as I was suddenly overcome with the sensation of being 17 and in the middle of my own Highers.

I am one of the age group who sat the very first Scottish O-Grade. Because I attended a selective senior secondary school, in the double-language stream, we were told that we would merely take such O-Grades as were deemed necessary for us individually, "in the by-going" as they said. No exam leave as such - just the day of the exam itself. We all sat Arithmetic; I also took the exams in Physics, Chemistry and Maths (not my best subjects, so an insurance policy) as well as Geography (which I would then drop until S6).

So my memory of being 17 actually slipped back to one day in S4, when I was 16. I think it may have been yesterday's sun that did it; I sat O-Grade Arithmetic on a glorious sunny morning in Hillhead High School and then I took off. I met my mother at Queen Street station at lunchtime - she coming from the school where she taught mornings, I fresh from the sums - and we hopped on a train to Edinburgh. There we climbed Salisbury Crags, sat in the sun, and went for our tea before the train home. It was my first taste of freedom.

And it was this freedom that came back to me as I listened to people recounting their exam horrors, the stress they were under, the nerves and the late night studying and the lack of sleep. I honestly remember nothing of these. I recall the freedom of being alone in the empty house with hours of study before me - for we did have exam leave in S5 - and the chance to do what I wanted when I wanted. As the sun moved round to the back garden I would take my chemistry notebook outside to swot equations (I never really understood chemistry, so everything had to be learned by rote. I scraped a Higher). I grew tanned and relaxed, though there was always some turquoise ink staining the hand I'd used to cover what I was learning. I'd take afternoons off and walk the half-hour or so to school for orchestra practice, sauntering in as the bell went at 4pm, enjoying seeing friends and adored music teachers as we rehearsed for the Glasgow Music Festival (unaccountably, this was always at the end of May, so we were actually working our butts off at the same time as studying; I actually found the tension of the Festival much worse than that produced by exams).

By the time I reached my last exams (what were they in S5? French? Chemistry?) I had been off school for perhaps a fortnight and was bored with my holiday. Yes, I did last-minute revision, but it never felt more than a kind of obligation. Maybe we'd been so rigorously pushed in class that we knew most of the stuff already. The Hamlet stuff I'd mugged up so assiduously went out of the window when I saw the question (about Shakespeare's tragic heroines - I ask you!) and switched regretfully to comedy with Twelfth Night; the Latin was its usual slightly worrying breeze of being finished almost an hour early (I never liked going over what I'd written in an exam). I always assumed, I think, that I'd pass - even in the subjects I was destined to scrape through I never believed I'd actually fail - and I was eager to get on with orchestra and end-of-term nonsense and being out in the sun with my pals. (Hillhead in these days had open corridors ...)

So my memories clashed happily with the programme on the radio as I wandered in and out of the sunny garden and felt 17 again. As to whether I'd care to be 17 again ... that's another matter.

Ah. There's something I forgot to mention: I experimented with cigarettes, in exam leave. Daring, huh?

Higher English reappraised - again

Joanna Blythman had a sensible post in Sunday's Herald about the latest flurry in Higher English exam circles. Ever since the last change - when Higher Still appeared and drastically reduced what was actually externally assessed - I've felt the lack of any chance for students who wrote well to capitalise on their ability. It was never the same merely to be told by your teacher that you had reached the required standard to sit the exams - for that, in essence, was what happened. It somehow devalued the whole process to have the person who was teaching you say "yes, all right - you've made it". Even when the folio of the previous system was being prepared for external assessment, it was possible for the teacher to collude in raising the standard by direct interference, and it was presumably to remove that suspicion that the folio system was changed, but it still left the teacher with the say-so on what stage the candidate had reached and deprived the student of the stimulus to show off in an exam. Even after several years of retirement I have a couple of ringbinders filled with the excellent writing of past pupils - kept to encourage others to reach the same standard, or to give ideas to the faltering - and I can still remember the content of many of the essays.

Actually I'd like to go much further back. I agree with Neil who tweeted a wee while ago that he'd like to see the Report brought back to Higher English. This involved the student in assimilating several documents, including sometimes a graph, on a given topic, and then writing a cohesive report which conveyed the facts as contained in the material. Creative it was not. It called for understanding, organisation and the ability to write clearly and dispassionately - skills which are actually more useful to the majority of students than the ability to write a description of an emotion or analyse a metaphor. It gave the less creative, clever mathematician a chance to excel in one area of English, and had an obvious spin-off in other subjects like Modern Studies.

To me, Higher English recently has become less stimulating for pupils and teachers as texts became more prescriptive and the need to stop and examine halted the flow of the year. There seemed to be less space to develop the realisation that if you could do one area of analysis you could do any others, and that to write well was exciting and challenging and a cumulative process. I grant that the all-or-nothing exam at the end of the session struck terror into some pupils - but why is that such a bad thing? Are we all going to sail through life without such moments? Some chance.

I'd suggest that if - as Blythman suggests - there has been a dilution in the standard of text studied, and if - as I know is the case - too many teachers concentrate on the parrot-learning of the formula which will produce a passable critical essay at the expense of a real understanding of how a writer's craft works, then it's the training of teachers we need to look at. Maybe any teacher entrusted with teaching Higher needs to be regularly appraised and sent for retraining if he falls short of the standard our best pupils deserve. Maybe the time currently spent on internal assessment would be better spent exploring a new poem - pupils and teacher together, unprepared and excited by what they can find. On one-to-one discussion of how to bring writing alive, while others write on, absorbed in what they create. On showing teachers what is possible, and firing them with the need to share it. And then, after nine months, examining the results in the old-fashioned, open-ended way with the excitement of a real end-product to all this engagement and effort.

Bit like having a baby, really.

Lambs and exams

Lambs
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

It's absurd how the climate works in these parts. It seems no time at all since we were still bemoaning temperatures of 7ºc and huddling in the wind and rain, and now it's like being abroad - 27º when I took this photo. I was laughing at these lambs, who seemed to have abandoned their mum to play with the gang; they formed what I was thinking of as the Toddler Group and were butting each other and - yes - gambolling. On the same walk I clocked several swallows, some agitated oystercatchers and a couple of butterflies, and the other day I heard my first cuckoo of the year and a woodpecker.

It is, of course, what we used to call exam weather, and I was recalling the sensation of emerging from the gloom of the assembly hall in Hillhead High School to the smells of a city spring - dust, cut grass, diesel fumes - with the feeling that life was going on without me. I seem to remember taking exam leave very seriously, swotting away in solitude at home before going back to school for an orchestra practice. I used to experiment with cigarettes in our empty house (my parents were both teachers) and then spend an age trying to disguise the smell, but there were never any friends around to distract me because we were scattered over Glasgow and it was too hard to meet up. Besides, I never had any money. What a strange life, now I come to think of it.

We all did rather well, mind.