The real reason we went to college for four years

IT'S THAT time of year again - when students are revving up for the exams ahead and teachers are heaving sighs of relief at the prospect of a long hot summer with no students, bells or copies to agitate the brain.

We seem to spend most of our time persuading, cajoling, encouraging, calming and mopping up tears.

After all, this is why we spent four years in college.

On the one hand, there is the student we have cherished all year who is frantically perusing countless handouts, revision books and notes and hanging on to our every word. The greatest fear here is that she won't last the pace and will become a mass of quivering jelly incapable of a coherent thought on the day.

On the other hand, there is the student we all love and recognise with remarkable familiarity, who finds exams an unwelcome interruption in her social life. This student, on one of her infrequent visits to school, checks the noticeboard on the last week of May to see if the exam timetable has been compiled.

This was the same student who became frantic two years ago at the prospect of missing World Cup matches to sit a Junior Cert exam.

Then follows the unwelcome task of nursing them through the actual exam itself. Some students will do a practice run through the rush hour traffic the previous day to estimate the ETA at the examinations, assuming mother's car doesn't have a breakdown on the way.

Others will leave it until the morning itself to take the younger brother's bicycle that hasn't seen the light of day for months and expect to arrive half an hour ago.

Meanwhile the weary teacher is coping with the "jitterbug" who has arrived too early and finds herself constantly checking the clock for the last minute arrival of the "cool cucumber" who will breeze in with not a moment to spare.

Finally, you deliver them all into the safe hands of the supervisor and feel confident that your job has reached a fruitful end. How naive!

You delay taking off into the sunset and wait for the reassuring words of your students as they reemerge. No such luck! Again you meet the student who breezes out proclaiming her confidence and almost taking you to task for your ominous warnings.

It is only as she rushes past you in delight that you notice she has failed to hand up her completed graph question and is confidently leaving the school with it under her arm. In your wisdom you decide that ignorance is bliss and you leave well enough alone.

Then you notice the last student to leave the hall is berating herself for forgetting a formula, not completing a question and running out of time. All the reassurances in the world do nothing to assuage her fears until August.

You finally leave the exam centre in the pouring rain and try to muster up the earlier enthusiasm for the summer break. It's been a long hard winter!