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Guest column | Help your kids banish the exam boogeyman
Parents can play an important role in alleviating exam stress; they should offer quiet support to their wards rather than pressuring them
Board and annual exams are just around the corner and it is natural for both parents and students to get the jitters. Some students are burning the candle at both ends, while others are busy devising innovative and ingenuous strategies to take the proverbial bull by its horns.
Others are grappling with ‘exam phobia’ which can manifest itself in myriad forms such as nausea, fever, palpitations, short term memory loss, loss of appetite and even nervous diarrhoea.
An anecdote from my school days pertaining to examination stress comes to mind. We were in the ninth grade and had to take our history exam on that particular day. While I was coolly going through my notes before the exam, my friend, who was on tenterhooks, was mugging up the chronology pertaining to world history. A sudden impish impulse came upon me as I asked her, “Can you tell me the years of the commencement and conclusion of World War I?” Pat came her answer “1914-1918”. “How about the second?” I asked. “1939-1945,” she replied. After a dramatic pause, I again asked her, “How about the Third World War?” She considered it for a while, then glanced through her notes, and finally cried in panic, “Oh my God, I don’t have the dates for the Third World War!” It took her a while, while I burst into a fit of giggles, to get the joke.
No substitute for parents’ faith
For most students, it is not the exam itself that causes stress but the fear of failure, resultant shame and the accompanying mortification of having let their parents down that causes them to panic. As a parent, I feel that no amount of professional counselling can equate the faith instilled by parents.
I owe it to my parents for never having had to face undue mental stress over my studies. They always reassured my brother and I, that whatever the outcome they were always by our side. My mother, who was our solid support system, once said this to my brother, “Do what is good for you. I’ll be there beside you to answer and face the world.”
Exams are temporary, education is permanent
In our race to become achievers, we tend to forget that exams do not end the day we receive our diplomas or degrees. Life is a never ending examination and every day it throws us questions that are mostly out of syllabus. However, it is the ability to tackle those questions with a composed self that distinguishes winners from losers. An anonymous quote aptly sums up the argument: “Exams and grades are temporary but education is permanent.” Therefore, what we learn is more important than the outcome. When I sat for my board exams, a similar quote written on the wall of the examination hall inspired me to do my best, “Do your best and be prepared for the worst.”
Most parents in our country pressure their children to take up medicine or engineering as their fields of study without taking into consideration the child’s aptitude or attitude. The lure of a white-collared job makes them push their child through a never-ending rigmarole of coaching classes, cut-throat competition and cheek to jowl merit lists. On a personal note, I believe that parents need career counselling more than their wards so that they may allow the children to chart their own career paths. When a person is in love with what he does, his fears cease to exist and he achieves the unachievable for, as they say, “Love knows no boundaries.”
sonrok15@gmail.com
(The writer is an associate professor at SD College, Ambala Cantt)
