The exam season blooms like a tumour. Pupils go pale and wan, parents fret and worry – and teachers try to calm the poor mites down. It’s not easy. I remember my old head of department trying to take the heat out of things at the start of a big English exam: 250 poor souls were sitting their GCSE at dawn in the exam hall, quaking, anxious, drugged, sleepless or in a quiet rage. He smiled, paused, and in a comically booming voice, went hyperbolic: “What you do today will echo through eternity.”
It’s a line from Gladiator. He smiled. We smiled. They didn’t. Most didn’t get it. It didn’t spread calm, it spread varieties of panic. Many examinees were in such a state of hysteria, they believed him.
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