The Busy Week has passed — Hurrah!

[Originally written on 22nd February 2009]

In a previous post (see for One Day Before the Scholarship Examination) I mentioned that I had a busy week ahead, from Sunday 15th February to Friday 20th of that month. Well, this has now passed, and I feel the time for giving details has come. Yes, it was busy! And simply, what a relief it was to come home on Friday from school to enjoy a three-day holiday....

On Sunday, a week before, I went to St. Louis school for my Scholarship Examination, hoping and praying that it would go all right. Our Class as well as Scholarship teacher also came, giving the "usual," i.e. words of encouragement. The first paper was at 10am, with most of us already there at 9:30. However there was a slight hitch — not enough students had come and the paper was postponed to 11am. This meant that all things were done an hour later instead of being on time. This also meant that at 1pm , we would be giving our Intelligence Test paper instead of being down for lunch. Well, my mother was going to come at that time, and she'd probably go away after seeing that no one was down. "Why couldn't they have informed us earlier?" I grumbled. But this was just the tip of the iceberg.

We just sat for an hour, and then went up for the Language paper. It was for one hour, but it was so easy that I finished it in 25 minutes! Apparently the paper went well for all of us, and the moods were good as we come down at noon to enjoy some snacks and play. We weren't that bored about the next paper (Sadaf Miss, who was the Scholarship teacher had informed us that the second paper would be Intelligence Test, and that was no big deal, so we just enjoyed ourselves.) Then we went up at 1 o'clock. The papers were delivered. I didn't bother even reading the instructions, and just started doing the first question. To my surprise, it was based on Maths. I quickly assured myself that some questions in Intelligence were based on Maths. I did the question, and turned to the next one. Again to my surprise, it was a Maths one. Just out of curiosity, I looked at the question paper's heading and got a terrible shock. On large capitals, it was printed: "MATHEMATICS."

As I said in my previous post, we didn't know much Maths and it was more of a surprise that Maths was the second paper than the surprise that most of the sums were word problems rather than of the objective type. "Gah!" I shouted inwardly. "If we had proper information, we would have studied far more in the Break!" I was very angry, and rightly so. Still, I kept on. To my horror, I found that the sums took a lot of time, more than two minutes at least. 50 questions in 1 hour meant we only had a minute!—to solve one question, and as I said before, most of the questions were word problems, trickier and trickier, making it impossible to solve a question in a minute. When I was at the 27th question, I just checked the time out of curiosity. It was 1:50!! Just ten minutes remained. "Now," I said to myself, "this is it. Guessing time." After this, I didn't bother to solve any questions, I just guessed. (Not my fault, there was so little time. Misers.) Worse still, our supervisor's watch was faulty — it gained five minutes. And she took the paper at 1:55pm, before realizing the fact that the bell which had just rang was just a "warning" bell. I was nearly seething with fury!! But there was nothing to be done. : -(

We came down and exchanged our news, and it was no big surprise to me that all of us had suffered. Even my worst rival had the same news. We discussed for a little while longer and then ate our lunch. I had nothing, but my friends generously gave me some snacks. Soon after, my brother arrived with lunch. I ate it hungrily and then we went up to give the Intelligence Test paper. It was no big deal as I said before, although some of the questions were hard. They did take some time to solve, especially the code ones, even though I flatter myself that I am the "Code Master." But as our stomachs were fed and the minds surprisingly calm, we all did the paper well and then came downstairs. We had been there for six hours! I could hardly walk!! Finally we reached home. Phew.

All this for just one day! However, it turned to be the biggest in the week. Thank God the first paper on Monday was easy — Social Studies! Clearly nothing to worry about. Then on Tuesday we had Marathi and Science; Wednesday English and Hindi; Thursday was a holiday (hurrah!); and Friday we had Maths and Drawing. I am pleased to say that they all went well. :D But seriously, how tired I was!! And simply, what relief to come home.....

Thankfully we had a three-day holiday, for Monday there was some Indian festival, Mahashivratri or something (not sure if the spelling's right.) So we are enjoying ourselves! Yes, yes, we do have some homework — nothing to worry about, though. All in all, it had been a HECTIC week! But then, hard work is always rewarding, and this has been proved in my case.

I'm enjoying myself! : -)

[Originally posted by Philip Mannering at 12:09pm on Sunday, February 22, 2009.]