A nerd and midterms

When I was in school, I truly liked taking finals and midterms. No, I did not like the days or weeks of studying in advance. I also did not very much care for the waiting right before the final, those few moments in which you’re running everything through your head one more time, fighting the urge to dive into your bag and check in your book. But once I was sitting in that chair, opened the exam, and read through the questions in a preliminary scan, I hit the “exam-zone”. My mind was clear, focused, and as I would pen quick notes in the margins of the test paper, I felt like a runner hitting their stride. And even if I didn’t know all of the answers right away, an incredible peacefulness would envelop me every time. This is where I needed to be, and this is what I needed to be doing, so I better do it. In fact, I used to get so caught up in what I was doing, apparently entire bookbags could fall of chairs, people could be coughing their heads off, or arguing with the professor about something, albeit in whispered undertones, and I would not have a clue. I never even felt the urge to use the bathroom, until after the final, when the pains in my stomach would have sprinting to the nearest bathroom. During finals, I was in a bubble. A bubble which was no one was ever really aware of, until one notorious occasion at my Dutch university. For one of my upper-level classes, the professor had prepared a few of the finals in English for our foreign students. They had accidentally been placed on top, and so I, not the foreign student at the back of the line, received one. Of all the students to whom a final in a foreign language could have been given, I, the one who spent numerous years at American schools, was probably the worst. I didn’t even give it a second thought, and started scribbling my first answer to the open question. In English. It wasn’t until I was bicycling home with a friend, that I started to wonder about that. The professor thought it was hilarious, although the two foreign students did not find it equally funny.

Now that I administer my own finals and midterms, I can’t help but wonder if any of my students enjoy the rush of taking exams. If any of them go into a zone of feverished writing and thinking. Academics seem so different from when I was a student. These students seem surprised when I tell them that, no, they cannot wear their IPods while taking their finals. We had just made it into the portable CD-era when I was in college. Because someone’s phone will always go off, I have all my students place their cellphones on my desk. Besides the fact that my generation, obviously, did not own cellphones, I always marvel at the fact that some of those phones have features that, back then, I couldn’t have even imagined. My students seem a lot more preoccupied with other things; rush, parties, steplines, and the social life of the dorms, than I ever was.

But in spite of all those differences, I still see a very familiar gleam light up some students’ eyes right before a final. Their mouths become one straight line, they stop talking and laughing, and stare off into space until they’re holding the test in their hands. Then they dive into the paper, their pens scribbling furious notes while they consider all the questions and what they could write. These are the students whose papers are filled with paragraphs of mind-numblingly precise detail and who use the backs of their tests for notes. Students who really don’t re-read their answers after they’ve written them. Why should they, after having extensively outlined their answer first? Students who don’t look up when someone walks in late, and who don’t ever smile when handing in their final. Of course. It is a very serious business after all.

Midterms are fun.

And I’m getting old.