Damsel to the rescue - part 1

British Airways used to run an ad campaign in the 90's: The ad pictured a bunch of school kids running on a footpath…with the caption  -  Children walk to school, but run home… the caption, I felt was  a brilliant example of simply capturing those unarticulated joys of life.

.

In the chequered life of a school kid, some words never fail to evoke an emotion out of the ordinary.

Exam, Test, Semester were enough to leave us with that sick feel in the tummy.

Those were the days, when examinations were a mandated feature of school life. We never heard of any deliberations of how not to tax the young minds. It was a given, students had to be evaluated  once a while on their acquisition of knowledge and by inference their ability to accomplish something in life.

It was not that the news was broken to us all of a sudden, it was according to a schedule which was followed almost to the T, and announced in the School Diary.

The School Diary was among the first books that we received from the school. It had a time table sheet on the inside cover, a few pages with the National Anthem, The Pledge and some Prayers….A sheet of the student particulars that was required to be filled in and signed by the parent and submitted at the start of the year, the list of holidays tentative exam dates and lots of blank calendar pages for the School calendar from Jun to April. It was considered a remarkable feat if those pages remained blank…without any adverse comment from the teachers, which had to be signed off by the parent.

 The year was divided into two - Summer vacation (the big one) and Winter vacation (the small one). Never really understood why we referred to it as winter vacation….it was neither winter nor did we go on a vacation….Each had to be earned…so to speak, after appearing for the big semester exams.

 In addition each semester would be interspersed with unit tests - tests of all the subjects for a max of 30 marks each. Beyond all the dread and anxiety of an exam, the good thing about these exam days, was that one did not have to lug around the backpack with its umpteen notebooks and textbooks and also, school days were just for a couple of hours. Class 8, saw for the first time, when tests for two subjects would be held on the same day, followed by regular classes, contrast to the leisurely pace of one paper per day till class 7.

 The first unit test for Class 8, was underway. We normally were seated in different classrooms along with kids from other classes, distributed at a maximum of two per bench. Those were the only days when we sat freely rather than the three to a bench that was the norm for the other days. These were all those anti-copying measures taken by the school or so I surmised.

 Many would be poring through their notebooks even when it would be just a minute or two before the bell was rung. I always wished to avoid that crowd, but to my consternation, there would be someone who would pop a query or check if you read that or this etc…. And the amusing part was when the acknowledged bibliophiles (padpists in local jargon) in the class would admit to not knowing this and having left an entire chapter etc… And the torture even continued after the exam was over, when they would compare what they wrote….Oh, I just loved to bolt away from the scene….

 To be continued