酷我-北美枫

[Wenxin]

Studying for exams can be one historic journey

Sir George A. Washington was the first Prime Minister of Canada. No, silly, wasn't it Sir Laurier Banting? Impossible. I'm sure that was a minister of labour. Perhaps it was Sir Alfred Borden. No, I remember. It must have been Sir Ronald MacDonald!
Usually, I have no problem with frenetic cramming. When I start to hear voices arguing in my head, however, it's a fairly good indication I'm near the breaking point.

In high schools everywhere, this is the time of year when tensions run high, tempers run short and every second person walks around half-asleep with little black circles under their eyes: exam week.

HAWK-EYED

This is the time when students are forced in two or three hours to demonstrate everything they have learned in the past five months while equally stressed, but nonetheless hawk-eyed teachers breathe down their necks.

To make things even better, exam week usually comes when students are already bending beneath the weight of summative evaluations, which are usually worth about as much as the exams themselves.

It's survival of the fittest. Those with the best scores can expect to graduate to a university, others may go to college and still others, determined not to write any more exams, will enter the workforce.

Here, the world in January is an unforgiving place.

It's in anticipation of this that I sit down resolutely and make truly heroic attempts to navigate the ocean of notes spread out upon my desk.

In high spirits, I open my history textbook and plunge into Chapter One. When I begin studying, of course, I quickly realize that I know less than half of what I should know. This inevitably gives rise to feelings of both guilt and panic, a strange emotional mixture that makes me physically jittery, but mentally dim.

I feel like I'm ready to run to Vancouver, ski across the Yukon and then swim the Pacific Ocean; I'm just not ready to write an exam.

I am not overwhelmed by the information, which admittedly is not that much. I just can't absorb it at all. Three hours, five breaks and a couple of phone calls later, I end the day's studying with one important piece of knowledge: Canada sold 892 tractors in 1932. Now, if only that could prove even remotely useful.

Why do I even bother? What has my exam score done to deserve so much of my attention? I do all this for a cold hard number, a figure insensitive to the countless grey hairs sacrificed to its cause, and, more likely than not, to the countless more grey hairs it will produce when it reaches its recipient. It's all quite cruel, really. And on that note, I close my books for the night.

(North York Mirror Jan. 31, 2003 )

[[许文辛]]

Studying for exams can be one historic journey

Sir George A. Washington was the first Prime Minister of Canada. No, silly, wasn't it Sir Laurier Banting? Impossible. I'm sure that was a minister of labour. Perhaps it was Sir Alfred Borden. No, I remember. It must have been Sir Ronald MacDonald!
Usually, I have no problem with frenetic cramming. When I start to hear voices arguing in my head, however, it's a fairly good indication I'm near the breaking point.

In high schools everywhere, this is the time of year when tensions run high, tempers run short and every second person walks around half-asleep with little black circles under their eyes: exam week.

HAWK-EYED

This is the time when students are forced in two or three hours to demonstrate everything they have learned in the past five months while equally stressed, but nonetheless hawk-eyed teachers breathe down their necks.

To make things even better, exam week usually comes when students are already bending beneath the weight of summative evaluations, which are usually worth about as much as the exams themselves.

It's survival of the fittest. Those with the best scores can expect to graduate to a university, others may go to college and still others, determined not to write any more exams, will enter the workforce.

Here, the world in January is an unforgiving place.

It's in anticipation of this that I sit down resolutely and make truly heroic attempts to navigate the ocean of notes spread out upon my desk.

In high spirits, I open my history textbook and plunge into Chapter One. When I begin studying, of course, I quickly realize that I know less than half of what I should know. This inevitably gives rise to feelings of both guilt and panic, a strange emotional mixture that makes me physically jittery, but mentally dim.

I feel like I'm ready to run to Vancouver, ski across the Yukon and then swim the Pacific Ocean; I'm just not ready to write an exam.

I am not overwhelmed by the information, which admittedly is not that much. I just can't absorb it at all. Three hours, five breaks and a couple of phone calls later, I end the day's studying with one important piece of knowledge: Canada sold 892 tractors in 1932. Now, if only that could prove even remotely useful.

Why do I even bother? What has my exam score done to deserve so much of my attention? I do all this for a cold hard number, a figure insensitive to the countless grey hairs sacrificed to its cause, and, more likely than not, to the countless more grey hairs it will produce when it reaches its recipient. It's all quite cruel, really. And on that note, I close my books for the night.

(North York Mirror Jan. 31, 2003 )