Shreya Sen-Handley | I still have bad dreams of exam rats and brickbats
I’m in an exam hall despairingly staring at blank pages, because I can’t seem to recall any of the answers to the questions before me. Then I’m struck by why — because I haven’t attended a single class that year! And even more mortifyingly, I seem to have forgotten to put my shoes and nether garments on when I stepped out! I try to run but the other examinees laugh in my face, whilst invigilators bar my way. One reaches out to grab my shoulder and give me a firm shake.
“Wake up, Shreya, you’re having a bad dream!”
It turns out to be my loving husband and not a beady-eyed invigilator. Groggy and middle-aged in the early hours of a nippy English morning, exams, the Indian summer heat in which they always took place, and the extreme anxiety they generated, should’ve been a world away.
Yet, I get these dreams still, and wake up convinced of their veracity and immediacy as well. But the events in this recurring dream never really happened — though not the best of students, occasionally truant and forever swot-resistant, I did sit for and pass all my exams, some even with flying colours! My subconscious isn’t resurrecting a genuine memory, or making me relive an actual event, why then do I keep having these nightmares?
Apparently it’s commonplace, as various worries morph subliminally into exam-anxiety dreams. Comprising 39 per cent of all nightmares, 11 per cent of us also dream we’ve turned up naked for our exams! Happens to you too, does it? Even more intriguingly, why do exams, for those who’ve left them behind aeons ago, have this terrifying hold?
For many, it would’ve been life’s first major hurdle, and amongst the toughest times known to us while tenderly young and impressionable. Who can forget the searing summer months of revision, the sweltering power cuts in which we were expected to plough on in the flickering candlelight, the long hours of etching answers that left our poor hands near-paralysed and our souls crushed?
How well we fared in our first board exams will determine the rest of our lives’ direction, they said. That it was make or break was drilled into us. Fear of failing at this juncture took on epic proportions, therefore, and even when suppressed, hounded us ever after. Those gruelling months left an indelible imprint on our subconscious. Not to mention the stigma of being “a flop”, leading to ostracisation and even suicide; the highest numbers of which are committed by 15 to 24-years-olds in India, with exam-pressure a common trigger.
No wonder the fury of the students deprived of fair Neet results! The degree of emotional, physical, and financial investment made in these, plus, the high expectations of what acing them might achieve, topped by the shock of the injustice and perfidy of how they were administered, have fanned the flames of justifiable anger of the thousands now hamstrung.
For parents living through this trauma with their children, it doesn’t feel once-removed. Any parent can tell you how closely entwined our lives are with our offsprings’, how their hurt wounds us, and how we relive our difficult journey to adulthood through every step of theirs.
When it comes to school and college exams, beyond offering support, encouragement, and homilies we know to be untrue, all a parent can do is stand back and watch, unwittingly becoming complicit in the torment our kids are put through, because we cannot, in good conscience, advise them to opt out. Which accounts for the return of my exam-anxiety nightmares!
My 16-year-old son has just finished his first board exams, not the earliest trial in his life as he was in and out of hospital as an infant, but a major hurdle to clear nonetheless. And he would seem to have done very well (results are not out yet but he aced his mock tests in the run-up), yet, you only have to look at the pimple-pocked state of his usually smooth face, and his dust and pollen allergies flaring, fuelled by stress, to see that despite his academic elan and composure, it has literally left a mark!
The good thing about his board exams in Britain is that, unlike my Kolkata secondary and higher secondary exams, they don’t have to appear for them in an alien environment. In Britain, they sit in their own school halls, though, of course, the examiners are external, and whilst exam questions may surprise them, the conditions will not.
I remember that my own secondary exams a long time ago (things may’ve changed, fingers crossed) took me to a school with broken fans, and desks that crumbled at the touch, to reveal, in my case, a dead rat! I was allowed to change desks but the day had got off to a stomach-churning start.
Many children are atypical (one in six), as I was without knowing it, and are thrown by new surroundings, so, in situations like the ones in which I found myself during my Kolkata exams, they’d be at a severe disadvantage regardless of their hard work and talents. And where’s the harm in giving all our children the comfort of familiarity, neurodivergent or not?
Good invigilation, reasonable parental expectations, fair and honest examiners and administrators, will eliminate any need to cheat on their part!
Or, why not base school-leaving grades on something gentler but more accurate; the evaluation of a child’s academic prowess over his many years of classes?
Till unnecessary pressure is taken out of the equation, results will be skewed, deliberately sometimes as in the recent Neet tests, and lives ruined, if just in our dreams decades into adulthood!
