Did I prepare Mansie for the wrong exam? « makeSplash.com by Sush Jaitly

Did I prepare Mansie for the wrong exam?

February 22nd, 2009

How did you do in your exam? Tell me the truth.

It’s February and so the most important thing going on in our lives at the moment are Mansie’s exams. Yeah, she’s just in the IInd grade but so what? Exams are exams. IInd grade or graduation. You have to prepare for it. More so when your child thinks she knows everything whereas she doesn’t. Whenever I tell her to sit down and study it’s like an effort, for both of us. For me to try and keep my cool and for her to just study. But this time around I was determined not to make such a big issue out of these exams and so I started preparing Mansie much before her exams so that she doesn’t have to slog at the end.

I went to her school and got her detailed syllabi and her datesheet for exams much before the school officially gave it to kids. I then made worksheets in my own hand for her and then me and Mansie got down to preparing her for her exams, albeit very slowly. Nonetheless, we prepared. This was in January. The first exam was scheduled on 21 Feb, ie yesterday. And it was of EVS- Environmental Studies. I made a kind of detailed schedule for her to study keeping in mind her datesheet. It was like one hour in the afternoon for a particular subject and one in the evening for another. Everything went according to plan and by the time Mansie left for her school yesterday she was pretty confident about the subject and so was I.

At around 10.30 or so I got a call from Mrs Shobha Dixit whose son is Mansie’s classmate. Now this woman is one hell of a talker. She could keep on yapping for one hour practically about nothing. I too generally played along with her because her child was in Mansie’s class. But today she had something to talk about, the exams. She told me about the kind of effort she had to put in to ensure that Harish, her son, was ready for it and how the school teachers were overloading children with so much and so on. Then she asked me if Mansie was adequately confident about today’s Maths paper. MATHS!!!! Did I hear that right? Did she really say MATHS? I said ‘Maths, but today is EVS?’ She was like -’Are you crazy? It’s Maths and Maths only.’

My heart sank. I couldn’t hear rest of her crap and I hung up. Can you guys imagine what state I was in? I rechecked the datesheet. It said EVS. Maths is next Tuesday. Was there a change in the schedule and the school forgot to inform me? I could kill them if that was the case. I called the school but the receptionist didn’t have the datesheet and she said that she cannot get the class teacher on the phone during school hours. So I waited. Waited with baited breadth. I kept walking around the house like a half zombie. Aleena also got scolded a couple of times only because I was jittery.

And then Mansie came home at 12.45. She seemed okay to me. I deliberately didn’t ask her which paper did she have today. I only asked her how was her paper. She said it was fine. I said that we need to start preparing for Maths which was next. She said-’Don’t bother.’ I nearly fainted and then she added ‘I’m ready for it. I know it all.’ I revived. It was EVS today and MATHS is next Tuesday. Thank God!!!! Thank God!!!!! Thank God!!!!

Wait a minute, this means Mrs Dixit had screwed up. Harish prepared for the wrong exam. What the hell? What can I say except that I feel really bad for Harish and his mom too. She might be an idiot but her son didn’t deserve this. Poor boy!!!!

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