Exams

Yeay, it is that time of the year. As you may or may not know, I haven’t had any exams until May. There were Mock Exams in January but they were more or less just “preparation” and “dry runs”, they didn’t have an impact onto my grades.

Consequently, everybody’s exams were cramped into May and June and over the period of a month I wrote all of my exams, covering everything that I learned in 4 subjects over the course of 9 months.

To complicate matters, there was a week of holidays right in the middle, followed by a week of “study leave” where you only had to come into school for exams. The number of exams you have to write varies with the subjects you take, it was 9 for me. And whereas the last two are spaced out nicely, I wrote the first seven within 10 days. It was stressful, to say the least.

What Stela and I thought is that as a method to cope with the stress better we could get stress balls. Our Hostmother liked the idea, said that she had made them herself before out of balloons and flour and that we could all make our own ones together. And that is what we did.

I wasn’t sure if I would be allowed to take the ball into the exam room but that turned out not to be a problem. So pretty early into my first exam (Geography) I squeezed the stress ball in my lap and…it popped. It just exploded in a floury mess on my legs.  In the middle of an exam! Needless to say that it didn’t fulfil its purpose that well in that moment. It didn’t help that from then on my brain spent a lot of time producing thoughts such as “What if someone in here has got a flour allergy? Some people have got that. What if they breath it in and then they die or something because my frickin’ balloon exploded???”

Not mine, out of obvious reasons -.-

It went off to a bad start, but afterwards nothing traumatizing happened anymore apart from the moment in my second Geography exam when one of the women who observed us to make sure that we can’t cheat walked up to me to ask me if I had brought another stress ball. I must have left a lasting memory.