XII: A class apart

The school life culminates in the Twelfth class (XII Standard); no wonder the stress levels of the kids also peak around the time. I vividly remember those days; A good twenty years back. My Exam centre was St.John's Higher Secondary School, Palayankottai. It was like a do-or-die battle, especially for the kids like me who were a part of the great Indian middle class. The troubles multiplied if you were from a small town. Again, I belonged to that class too. The Board marks sealed your fate, forever (It was said).  At that point in time, I was also aiming for admission in an institute located near the deserts that selected candidates purely on the overall Board marks. So you can very well imagine the multitentacled beast I was trying to tame.

As luck (and a tremendous amount of effort) would have it, I achieved what I wished for. 

My sincere thanks to the person who set the question paper for French-II. Yes! French was my second language in my higher secondary. Manageable quantum of syllabus, potential for almost 100% marks, and an escape route from Tamil that had a vast reserve of material were the main reasons why students like me landed at the house of Madame Lutgarde that was filled with the most hateable cats of our district. Our school did not offer French, so those of us who needed the language to score well in Class XII were to endure those creatures in the teacher's house. On a second thought I would say the cats were actually okay, when compared to the stench of fish that filled the sun-soaked study. To compensate for the turmoil in her house, we were cooling off in school when our classmates were taking their Tamil lessons. 

We did not buy any books for French, as madame gave us the photocopied material. The first lesson was about Pierre, a boy who with the help of his mother tried to unclog a kitchen sink. I remember those lessons very well, not because I had learnt a new language in a short span of two years, but precisely because my school education had prepared me well in the art of memorising things. But one area that was tricky was that unlike English or Tamil, in French there are genders for even non-living things. For instance, sun is a male while the moon and the earth are females; the car is a female while the engine that moves it is a male, so on and so forth (In a way there is some logic to it, apparently). In Paper-II we were required to write letters. And my memory ammunition had only 4-5 letters in it. I just could not memorise more from the lot of 7-8 probable letters that we were given beforehand. So I thanked my stars when one of the letters that I had prepared showed up in the question paper. I quickly spluttered it out. Merci beaucoup le mister di setter de question papiere... hurraye!

A cool ambience at home and the company of great friends matter a lot during those harassing months of XII. But what mattered more was the salt you got in Chemistry practical exams, salt analysis. You are truly blessed if you get any of the coloured salts like Copper Sulphate or Cobalt Nitrate. And not God, but only your Chemistry teacher and the External supervisor can salvage you if anything resembling the common salt that makes a rasam perfect lands up at your desk. You need to carry out a battery of tests, that are named as preliminary test, group separation, confirmatory tests, etc. More than the tests themselves, the names of some of the tests give you and your tongue a nightmare; Sample this: Chromyl Chloride test. And, let me make a real confession here - I owe my 50/50 in my practicals to my Chemistry teacher; I had got one of those colourless salts.

I was so comfortable in Physics. Truly. I had put in some serious hard labour. I knew each and every line along with the spelling mistakes of the book by-heart. I don't know how many of you can do it, but even at this very moment I can recite Newton's first law of motion without any stammer. I had multiple teachers, and evaluators for my practice sheets. In fact, till this date I carry those skills I had acquired in 'answer presentation'. It is not enough to merely to know things, it is equally important to make people realise you know things. In most exams, an evaluator spends only about 3-4 minutes to assess your answer sheets. Your entire efforts of preparation and performance get judged in only a few minutes; an entire year's work gets about only 250 seconds of notice. I'm so happy that along with my Physics lessons, I was also taught the crucial art of 'dressing up' (what you don't know well) and 'presenting' (what you are thorough with). It comes handy at the workplace too. But a story needs to have a twist: among the subjects, I scored the least in Physics. So sad! E is not equal to mc squared.

Even after two decades of inspiring economic growth, with opportunities galore, I see the rote memory industry still flourishing. This is definitely not education. This is pain. The youth and most parents are still under the constant stress of various test scores. Some schools finish the Class XII syllabus about one year prior to the Exams, and the following year is spent on gearing up the kids for the E-day. Come on! Perhaps the elephant needs more time to learn a new trick. The kids are continued to be taught to ask 'What? & When?', rather than to question, 'How? & Why?' And we are not talking about the stars like a Nadella here or a Sundar Pichai there, it is more about why we Indians do not own an Alibaba or Amazon; and why we rank so low on the International IP Index.

Board Exams are very crucial, and hard work does not have any alternative, there is not an iota of doubt about that. But the whole question is about - at what cost and for how long?


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