OPINION:
Mock exams in NCEA Level 1 are due to be held very soon, and they are only nominally mock — if students fall crook through Covid or whatever else later in the year during actual exams, the results of their mock exams will count for real. My Year 11 daughter explained this to me slowly and patiently so I could get my head around it. In return, I told her that the pressure is on for all of the 60,312 Year 11 students across New Zealand as they contemplate their first exams and the first sign that the wonderful innocence of childhood is totally behind them, that everything from now on is the stresses and strains of the education system marking you down as a success or a failure. Life! God it's awful.
Mock exams are three hours long, like actual exams, as they probably were back in the day when Year 11 was the Fifth Form, and NCEA Level 1 was the dear old School Certificate, also known as the least thing you could possibly achieve at college. I achieved the least thing by a very fine margin. I sat five exams and passed three. I have always been a glass way more than half-full delusionist and was convinced that passing three subjects was proof of my genius, and that the education authorities would beat a path to my door in Mt Maunganui wanting the chance to sit down and marvel at my thought processes. They must have got held up.
Mock exams require all the usual requisite hard yards prior to any kind of assessment, and we are devoted to these hard yards in my household, with constant use of flash cards and a commitment to, as she likes to describe it, "smashing it". I am there for her. While she sits and studies, variously, on the couch, at the dining room table, and on the high stools in the kitchen, I lie down, variously, on the couch and the bed and the sofa in my shed, and read things like a second-hand 1972 copy of the Charles M Schultz comic book, We Love You, Snoopy. An inscription on the inside cover reads, "To Mum, happy birthday, love Susan". I wonder how Susan got on with her School Certificate exams, and if she has kids who are now sitting NCEA Level 1. But there are more important things than success or failure. It was thoughtful of Susan to pick out that Charlie Brown book for her Mum. I look at my daughter studying hard and my heart fills up with love and awe to watch her being such a good girl.
Mock exams for NCEA Level 1 history are set to ask questions about World War II, the Cold War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, which rather promotes the idea that history is one damned war after another. All of these conflicts will feel ancient and remote to my daughter; even the oldest was felt as part of my immediate heritage. Strange to think I was born only 15 years after the end of the second World War. The dark shadow of Hitler still lay across the consciousness of the surviving world — and, in some households, its conscience. The war had a strange and almost guilty resonance in our Mt Maunganui home owing to the fact my father was Austrian, and had been imprisoned during the war on Somes Island as — who came up with this amazing term? — an "enemy alien". He was on the wrong side. He did not fight on the beaches. And yet history is also one day after another, peace is sometimes just a matter of who buys the next round, and in his later years he would often drink at the RSA. "We shall remember them," he would have chanted, in his musical Austrian accent.
