Jonathon Wardman

Update 1: That maths story

OK, here we go.  No more putting it off, no more saying I’ll do it and then not doing, this is actually it…I’m going to catch up.  Alright, so last time I posted I was writing about my exams and I had two more to go, and I promised that I would write about what happened with my Maths exams so where better to start…

The background to the story goes back to last year and exams then.  I sat Maths AS level way back then and didn’t do really well (that’s all written about in here, and is all gone now *tries not to remember*), so I decided to resit it this year, and went to my tutor, Joy, to ask her to tell the exam board not to accept my results.  This was a little difficult because I had missed the time that the forms had to be back with the exams office, so I had to go across there and sort it out myself.  Joy rang across and told them I would be coming and gave me the code for the door (amidst much patronising “don’t tell anyone” and “wash it off your hand when you have finished”).  So I went and cancelled the results all ready for this year.  Early this year, aware of the fact I needed to work on my maths, I went to see Joy to talk about some lessons and what I should do about it.  She suggested that I start to come to lessons after the Easter holidays when she would be doing revision groups and that I would get the most out of them having done the course before.

So, sure enough, I waited for Easter to come and go and then tried to get back to her after Easter, but kept missing her (or forgetting amongst looming exam work!), so in the end I got my father to ring up (actually, after all the nagging I got at home about not managing to talk to her, it took my father about a week to manage to remember, and he doesn’t have anything else to do!).  When he did she denied any knowledge of the fact I was wanting to resit the exam at all.  Now I know that she is busy, but lets just look at the facts shall we?  1) She knew I didn’t do as well as I hoped to do last year, and that’s why I chose not to site the full A-Level this year, and instead shuffle things about a little; 2) I went to her near the beginning of the year to decline my grade from last year – now I don’t know what she thought, but I’m not going to decline it for the fun of it and just get nothing from last year – and it wasn’t straight forward, so wouldn’t she remember that(?); 3) She is in charge of the UCAS things at our college, and she read through my form before sending it off (again, that wasn’t straight forward – it went back and forward, and I made a fuss about that as well before sitting next to her as she signed it off and sent it!) so she would have seen on that I had put it down; 4) I talked to her about half the way through the year about resitting it, and she agreed that it would be possible and that I should come to revision sessions after Easter; 5) I had talked at length about it with my personal tutor who had claimed he has talked to her about it (now, I know the organisation at that place is appalling, but I don’t see why Kevin should lie about that); 6) My Physics tutor knew that I was going to resit it (hmm, he didn’t forget even though it was only a passing comment to him) and had talked to Joy about it to ask what was going on (god knows what she told him, to say she had forgotten about it!).  So how she forgot is, honestly, beyond me.  Still, she had done.  That was failure to enter me number one.

So my father agreed to go in and talk to her about it, and we did one Wednesday afternoon, and after a little meeting where she patronisingly went though how hard I would have to work, and how much extra work it would be, she agreed that she would enter me for it and bombard me with past papers.  I took that one and got on with it as agreed (I even dropped it in for her to mark…I was on form).  While I was busy doing all this, unbeknown to me, my father had been talking to her some more on the phone and had agreed that, if there was no other way to do it, they would pay (why he did both myself and my mother aren’t exactly sure seeing as it was quite obviously their fault I wasn’t entered, but anyway, he did…).  So I got on with the past papers and other college stuff…and soon gave up with the past papers (they weren’t doing any good), deciding that I would revise my own way.  It worked better – I actually (grab something to hold onto here) enjoyed doing some of that maths when I was revising for the exams, and it actually seemed to help!

So days and weeks passed and exams got closer and my exam timetable dropped on the mat.  I looked, and it was nice and full…but there was something missing (two things actually, but one I didn’t mind and was sorted out straight away – the Politics was missing but I spoke to Fiona straight away as Kevin wasn’t in, and sure enough that Monday he apologise and entered me)…ya there was no maths.  Woo.  So I went into college to talk to someone high up, and at the same time my father stayed at home ringing exams (see, clever, a two pronged attack, hehe).  I was told that I should talk to exams, so I rang my father who was trying to…but they were busy.  He was told they were out in a meeting but would ring back as soon as they got in.  I walked about college wasting time for a while, then rang him back, which is more than exams had managed to do.  So my father rang them and sure enough they were in.  Now, apparently, they had received the thing from Joy saying that I wanted to be entered and sent back the confirmation slip which she had to sign, but had not got it back so assumed that I had been withdrawn. *Sigh*  My father convinced them to enter me.  I wanted to go and find Joy and do something really nasty to her, but I didn’t.  I went home.  That was failure to enter me number two.

A few days later it struck me that I didn’t actually know when the maths exams were, so I looked it up on the exam board’s website.  Its always nice to know that you have an exam on the coming Tuesday which you are massively under prepared for and might decide your future isn’t it?  Oh yeah, add to that the fact I had another 3 exams that day (oooh, exams I had done the years course for in about 9 weeks), the heatwave the country was going through, the greenhouse-roofed exam room, and having more exams than anyone else I knew at the college in one session and I was having a great time.  A few days of little sleep and much maths (and politics) revision and I was up at the crack of dawn to sit my 6 hours of exams that I had in that one day.

I did the politics 4 and a half hours in the morning and the maths in the afternoon when other people were doing the politics I sat in the morning of that day but should have done in the afternoon, as well as the maths which I was doing at the right time (are you following this) in the sweltering heat with about 6 hired in enormous fans which college had got in to try to keep the room cool (which made an awful racket, though it kind of blended into the background when you were busy thinking hard about what a hellish day you had had up to that point and had an impossible mathematical equation sitting in front of you), and actually only succeeded in blowing the hot air at your work – throwing it all over the place.

And so was my none entry to maths…twice…and all I have to do now is wait until Thursday to find out how badly I did (and if I don’t get into university because of it all, it will just be another sign of my general bad luck throughout all of my college life (hmm, if it does then don’t worry – I’ll sum it all up in my failure spare time, lol)).  And I think that just about wraps up my exam time (actually it doesn’t tell you about the room change of my very last physics exam where we actually started 20 minutes late because they didn’t bother telling us that we wern’t in the great greenhouse room, but down past the park in college, and how we (ok, Jodie) complained about that…maybe later…or not), so I will leave it at that.

I’ll be back to write about all the things I have been up to over the holidays…just you wait and see…and thenm when I am up to date, I will make sure I stay that way 😉