Sophia Waugh: School Days The strange decline of exam stress

We are in the middle of exam season and, you might think, towards the end of revision season.

I was a staggeringly idle student in every subject except for English, but then doing what I love (reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles) never really felt like work to me. It still doesn’t – hence my late return to university to work for a PhD.

I have soppy memories of lying on the lawn revising in the sun while my pet goose grazed around me. But I can’t tell the students that – ‘lawn’ and ‘pet goose’ both sound a little showy-offy.

Even I, lazy as I remember myself to be, am taken aback by the lax attitude to revising that many of my students have. I have told the students, endlessly, that I was revising for five hours a day by the Easter holidays.

At the last minute, thanks to various staffing disasters in our department, I was given another top set to prepare for the exams: two weeks to undo their terrible mock results and teach them how to write an essay – which was basically the problem, rather than a lack of knowledge of the texts.

It was not long before I realised that in this set there was in fact quite a lot of ignorance of the content, as well as an inability to structure an analytical response to a question. I asked one boy, billed as a clever one, why he had done so badly in his mocks.

‘I didn’t revise.’

‘That’s honest. Why not?’

‘I thought I knew it all.’ He did have the grace to smile. ‘It turns out I was wrong.’

‘Be honest,’ I said to one girl a couple of days before the first literature paper, ‘have you revised the poems at all yet?’

‘No, but I will do’, she answered. ‘When?’

‘At some point.’

Even her classmates laughed at this, but it did not reassure me.

Another girl turned up to one of her last lessons with me with a special plea.

‘Miss,’ she said, ‘I know you’re going to say no, but can I revise for chemistry this lesson? Last-minute revision is my vibe, but I couldn’t revise last night because I spilled my spaghetti Bolognese on the carpet and I was up until one o’clock cleaning it.’

I answered wearily, ‘I’ll pretend I can’t see you revising chemistry.’

I am more confident about my own class. There is the boy who learns his quotations via Latin. And the boy who somehow writes nine pages per essay, even though I tell him that, by the end of the first two, I know I can give him top marks. There’s the free-school-meals girl to whom the Glorious Benefactor has gradually given the beginnings of a fine library (and who will be going on to study A-Level literature next year).

I feel sick with fear for them, but also quietly confident.

And so on it goes, the eternal cycle. Year 11 is off my hands; time to turn my gaze on Year 10.