Accu(te)Pressure

“Beta, you better sleep now. You are stressing yourself for these insignificant marks? I always tell you its how much you learn that’s more important, not how much you score.”

This is a dialogue often heard on days prior to exams – worried parents trying to get their stressed out kids to relax.

In an ideal situation, we would be only too relieved to get away from those monstrous books.

But consider another exchange:

“Nahi yaar, I can’t come tomorrow. I have too much syllabus to cover.”

“Dude! You have the whole holidays ahead of you!”

“I know, but I’ve got to finish chemistry within the next 2 days…”

This is a conversation I recently had with a friend of mine having to give the re-exams after these holidays due to an unfortunate attack of dengue.

Had he asked his parents, he would have surely gotten permission to spend the day with us; he did have another two weeks of vacation left after all. It was his own discretion by which he decided that he couldn’t afford to take even a day off. You can say that he had a pretty stressful schedule chalked out for himself.

However, he is not the only one. Most of us remain cooped up in our rooms during the days leading up to our exams, cramming as many facts as we can into our already saturated minds. What drives us to do so?

Pressure - pressure to get good results, respectable marks. And who puts that pressure on us?

Not the teachers, they spend the last few days of school reassuring us that all will go well and we shouldn’t worry too much.

Not our parents either, they are busy convincing us that our teachers were right, that marks are not everything, that we must not overwork ourselves and follow a more rational study plan.

It is in fact of our doing that we skip meals, pull all nighters…almost quarantine ourselves.

Why?

Demoralisation. Repeatedly getting bad barks demoralises us and we gradually lose interest in the subject. We no longer feel compelled to study it sincerely and our belief that we have the potential to do better next time gradually fades away until we stop even trying to improve.

Peer pressure. Scoring the least amongst our friends makes us feel dumb. We study because our friends are studying, not wanting to take the chance of not doing as well as them. Also, despite what the teachers might say, we get the distinct feeling that our performance strongly influences our impression on them. The highest scorers automatically get classified as the smartest ones and earn the teachers’ favour, something important to all of us despite our vehement claims that we are too cool to care.

Disappointment. We subconsciously levy certain expectations on ourselves based on previous performances as well as our own judgement of our capabilities. If these expectations are not met, we feel disappointed in ourselves and choose to blame the amount of effort we put in. To make it worse, though probably without realising it, we assume that our parents judge us by those standards as well and feel that we would be letting them down. Performing well is perceived by us as a way to show gratitude to our parents for all the opportunities they provide us with. So we are impelled by a sense of duty of sorts towards them to study more even though the last thing they would want is us getting stressed out because of them.

Yet as I sit here writing this, talking about the unnecessary tension that we can easily avoid, I know that as soon as the next exams come, I will be showing similar signs. These things seem inevitable, no matter how much we may be ridiculing them…an inescapable part of student life.

Enough said though…I better rush now. I have a tuition test to go study for!