Morning:
10°c
My daughter has just finished her A-levels.
Hallelujah! It feels as though we have been in the shadow of these exams since she was about nine.
My daughter is off to chill out on a beach in Crete.
I am a completely frazzled wreck. Was it this stressful 30 years ago when I did the same exams?
It now all seems to be about learning strategies for getting the grades, rather than learning to love the subjects.
I remember being encouraged to flaunt lateral thinking, original thought and personal revelation to disarm the examiners.
I assumed they were immersing themselves in whatever I had written; tut-tutting, chortling, admiring my nerve while despairing at my risible use of the semi-colon.
Is this how it is now? There are many playground rumours and urban myths — about English A-levels being marked by computers, or by people in Indian call centres marking from check-lists.
What parent isn't fascinated to know who sets the questions, what is the ideal answer, what level of experience and leeway has the person doing the marking?
Like many parents, I have become alarmed that in certain areas not only am I no longer qualified to help, my input actually jeopardises my children's chances of success.
I fear my free-range enthusiasm deviates from the battery-fed facts that seem to be necessary to tick the right assessment objectives.
Like any subjects dwelling in the murky waters of subjectivity, the arts and humanities have always proved fiendishly difficult to examine.
My worry is that the teaching of arts subjects is being corseted to something that encourages a clinical approach.
Certainly our children now seem terrified of allowing anything tangential or off-syllabus to impinge on their sensibilities — it won't get them ticks in the right boxes.
At A/S-level Theatre Studies my daughter did a Shakespeare and a Chekhov text, both of which my husband had directed and in which (elsewhere) I had performed.
We helped in her revision garrulously, enthusiastically, with a breadth of unexpected detail and insight gleaned from experience.
She gallantly tried to include some of our more ambitious interpretive suggestions. She got a B.
She is awfully knowledgable on the subject and a coveted university place rests on her achieving high grades — so we got it re-marked. Still a B.
We were allowed to see the paper. For every idea from us that she had trustingly included there was a complete absence of ticks in the margin.
She understandably felt that we were defiling her mind with stuff that was meretricious or wrong.
She said: “You have totally misled me. If you deviate from stuff about tone, context, cross-reference or whatever, you don't get any marks for it. It's just wayward.”
“But,” we said, aghast, “you can't reduce literature to something that can be aridly dissected — it's not a science. Its beauty lies in its obliquity.”
“Please stop intruding — examiners look on that kind of unsubstantiated enthusiasm as inappropriate waffle.”
I looked at some recommended revision books for English and they were terrifying — full of flow charts and underlined words such as “value continuum” and instructions about “appropriate responses to text”.
Surely exams should be there for examiners to spot and champion those who have real instinct or feeling for a subject, because these are the people who are most likely to contribute something of value in that chosen field.
Otherwise people end up debt-ridden at university, mistakenly studying subjects for which they got the desired grades — but for which they have no real passion.
Echoes from the Somme for our times
Theatre recently as part of their revival season, it was lovely to go back this week and experience being in the audience in its wonderful, intimate auditorium, at Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme.
A play with a longer title than some entire plays. McGuinness is a stunning writer — funny, bold, poetic, ruthless, tender.
The play observes a group of Ulster Protestant army volunteers, from joining up to their slaughter on the fields of France.
The play captures them both as individuals and representatives of a culture and a religion.
McGuinness searingly shows how war, culture and religion can both unite and destroy men.
It is harrowing and immensely moving. If only it weren't infused with renewed topicality.
Paris proves British taxis are best
I have just returned from Paris where we waited for an hour-and-a- half for a taxi at Gare du Nord.
Cabs only deign to stop very occasionally at the elusive taxi ranks.
When you politely tell them your destination, they stare at you as if you are a cretin.
They then light a cigarette, phone their girlfriends/bookies and yell at them, and proceed to take the most circuitous route possible.
If you try to mention this, they turn the radio full blast to a station with a pro-Le Pen talk show interspersed with techno sung by the French equivalent of Pinky and Perky.
When you finally arrive, they charge a sum of money that bears no relation to the fare on their meter.
But you have to pay because your bag is still locked in their boot.
You hand over the money — and they look at you as though you're a complete miser.
They then scream obscenities at the traffic that has accrued behind you and drive off over your foot.
I love British black cabs. We still have the best taxi system in the world.
Reader views (2)
Imogen- how would you (& all the other less fortunate A level students) have felt if your daughter, via your/your husband's expert 'coaching' got/gets an A or A* at A level? It's the middle-class obsession with their kids, or 'helicopter parenting,' that keeps disadvantaged kids out of their share of Russell group universities. The affluent 'coached' minority still get the majority of good uni places, professional jobs & best life chances. And that's after attending the 'best' schools/private schools.
- Carole, Essex, 26/06/2009 10:23
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London has by far the best Taxi service in the world. One of the few things this country still wins international awards for.Cheaper than mini cabs as well these days. Should be cherished.
- Ted, London, 25/06/2009 13:24
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