testing times

Jispa is going through her reviews at school. Now that she is in the first standard these would be her first quasi – exams. I always hated exams and I still sometimes get nightmares that I am horribily unprepared, which at many times would have been an accurate representation of reality. I wonder how I got through college passing the exams. Econometrics was a famous one. I still don’t know what the hell it means. And I passed it. I don’t know how. In 11th standard in commerce we had an option to choose between Math and SP. Now in tenth I scored a whopping 147 on 150 in math with 74 in algebra and 73 in Geometry. I know for a fact that I only got one mark in algebra wrong. It was first of the fill in the blanks. They had five marks of fill in the blanks. The first one being some sort of a quiz question. Something like is 1 an integer or something like that. Rest were all perfect sums. The word was that they purposely cut marks if you hit 75 else they have to give you an award or something. So basically I was something of a math cat. Hence in 11th I said chuck it, lets take SP and work at math in FYBCom later. What is SP? Er…. Secretarial practice. They basically teach us letter writing and other correspondence. I think was designed to help weak math students from running away from 11th. I can’t believe I did that. Though I am pretty happy I did that. I just traded in my favorite subject for letter writing. Not that subject helped me too much but one thing I can tell you for sure, I write more letters (emails) in a day than I do math sums. The math sums we do are learnt in the 5th grade tops. At least it gave me some more time for doing nothing in college. Doing nothing got me my wife. Beat that Mr. Mathematician.
In FYBCOM, when math was reintroduced for a year, I took classes and in those I was happy that I hadn’t lost my touch. I was good as ever solving and understanding derivates better than others, a mile ahead of the lot.
Over the years I have come to the conclusion that math for me is visual I don’t see numbers I see parts and wholes. The other day when we were buying 18 pieces of something at 5 each, my friend along with calculated 18X5 while I did 20X5 minus 10. he did not understand why I did that. I have been doing that since I can remember. 7 is a bottom half number in my head while 3 is a top half number. Similarly 27 is a bottom half number while 124 is a top half number. I see rows of tens, twentys and thritys etc and the additions are done by changing rows. So 27 plus 27 is a 40 plus 4 and a row change and is therefore 54. Weird…
So coming back to FY. I crack the classes but when we begin to start study a fortnight before the exams, I open my notes and I see the sums and my head reels. I can’t remember any of these sums. They are all the derivate sums that mean nothing to me. For some reason I forget them all. What the hell am I going to do? We study some old papers and we realize the pattern of marks. 20 marks for simple algebra (the stuff I got 74 on 75 for); so that’s done. Then we have 20 marks for BASIC programming. Yes BASIC programming. How did that get into math class. I dunno but since that was stuff that I had done in 9th standard that would have been a breeze, only thing is that I needed to brush it up a bit. Jasmine was the cat at BASIC and she taught me stuff. So there attempting 40 marks and getting a little more than 35 was the aim… actually anything more than 34 was acceptable :). Maa mein pass ho gaya, maa… mein pass ho gaya… And math was my super favorite subject. So I guess you would know how I would have fared at the other subjects. But in spite of all that I have no clue how I passed with first class through out. I guess the fact that accounts was really simple as a subject might have something to do with it and the other subjects required little knowledge else expect the ability to write long English.
But an accounts was another wild story. In 11th I was out of school and flying on my independent wings. So I sat in my first unit tests and got some 7 marks on 50 and then in the first semester exam I got some 2 marks on hundred. My really sweet class teacher (her name was Ms. Vahi) takes me one side and says, “dear boy, you might be the CR but do know that if you do not get 105 aggregate in all you four exams in a subject, you will repeat the year. You WILL repeat the year.” The penny dropped. I studied for the second unit test. Took classes from my sister on reconciliation of errors and topped the class (second I think). Some things went wrong in the final and I missed on the scores. I did not realize that I have to pay attention to trial balance (the basic of accounting) and that would carry most marks. Hence my aggregate came to something like 75. I was doomed to fail. Another obscure came to my aid – you need 75 in three subjects and 105 in three subjects to pass. Hence you could get a total of 30 marks in three subjects each as grace. Maa mein pass ho gaya, maa… mein pass ho gaya…
Wow. I am sure Ms. Vahi gave me some grace to hit 75 so that I hit the grace marks to pass. I can’t believe I risked that. That was staying on the edge… the very precipitous stupid edge. But alls well that ends well.

Well this post was about Jispa’s reviews. Now you know what stand I have on exams and I don’t really want to put any more burden on her. The first review has been a test of our belief. We don’t want to send message that school is trivial yet we don’t want it to scare her. On other subjects she would do great but hindi is omsething she might be a bit lower than her own average. So we did a small take up and I realized it required brushing up on my Hindi. Udbilava, jata, eravat, were some words amongst others that I might have got stumped on. Jispa knew 90 percent of her words so I just wrote down al the words in English and she had to give me the Hindi versions. Underlining and constantly asking her the 10percent words helped her I guess. We started yesterday and continued till the bus stop today. By the time she left, she knew them all. one remained specially tricky –charan. I told her remember that you don’t put feet in your moth but you do put your favorite churan. That’s how you remember. She remembers ilag by enlarge…hehehehe.

This was fun. Jispa’s first review saw us on the test!