The strangest year; The strangest end to Sixth Form!

One day I'm sitting, in my Sixth Form study, panicking over my upcoming A-Levels and working from 8 in the morning till 8 at night; the next I'm in the same room wondering why it feels like my whole life has just fallen apart.

Coronavirus came as a shock to all of us at my school. We really thought that we would still be there right up till our exams. But that didn't happen and we will never get that time back. It's strange to think that my year group had gone through so much stress and hard work for two years to then be told that we no longer had to take our exams. We had spent hours every single day working with teachers and other staff to learn the content for our A-Levels and BTECs; hours revising and hours finding the coping mechanisms that would stop us from stressing out! Our lessons were always focused on the end result - the final exams! Out of no fault of our teachers, we would spend much of our lesson time looking at exam technique and how to answer questions rather than the content that we actually needed to know. This does make me question why do we go to school to learn or to learn how to pass an exam? (I'm sure that this is something that I will talk about in another article!) But, overall, there is no doubt that, even to the laziest person at school, the cancellation of our exams was a huge shock and felt awful after all of our hard work. I think for all of us we were expecting for schools to close when we first heard that Boris Johnson was going to make an announcement but when he said that the Summer Exam Series 2020 would not take place, and he seemed to brush past this very quickly, it was a moment that I will never forget.

Right now and at the time it seemed like my world was falling apart. I rang my best friend straight away and after eating dinner we drove to the front of our school and just spoke for an hour about how we felt. We both put a lot of time and effort into our exams and to us they are worth probably more than they should be. We had spent so much of our time at Sixth Form worrying about our exams, speaking to teachers for advice and supporting eachother with the ongoing stress. Working towards our A-Levels had become a lifestyle - it was what we woke up and went to sleep thinking about. So it was horrendous having this taken away from us in the blink of an eye. I fellt sorry for all students (in any year group), teachers and the school in general. All of the effort that everyone had put in; the hours spent preparing, marking and teaching by members of staff literally went to nothing in a split second. It was honestly heartbreaking, especially when these exams mean so much to us all, even though they shouldn't.

So life had changed dramatically. I still don't think I've got my head round the idea that I haven't and, possibly, won't ever take my A-Level exams. Instead, my grade has been awarded by my teachers' assesment, which I obviously trust, but it really feels that I haven't truely achieved my grade. The 'What ifs?' are constant: what if I had smashed that exam? what if I had revised even more and done better than my mocks? For weeks, I wasn't even able to face looking at the folder of work that I had accumulated across the 2 years of learning. I went from being stressed almost 24/7 to the only significant thing in my day being walking my dog for an hour. I know the situation was really crazy for everyone; we are all in different boats in the same storm. I think this is something that we will all reflect on for years to come. What should our focus be in life? What is the real point of our education system? Are we learning for the right reasons? These are questions that I'm bound to write about and explore because I truly believe that it is important that we learn from what is happening around us and take the positives from it.