Every Day Is a Thinking Day

What Exam Season Taught Me About Thinking

The English exams are over for another year, which means several things.  Across the world, or at least across my particular corner of Europe and Asia, A Level and IB students are emerging from the exam hall blinking into the light.  (Apologies to my Australian students, your release date will come.)  They have spent the last few months living in the company of unreliable narrators, repressed women, tragic heroes, modernist fragmentation, gothic doubles, postcolonial trauma, dramatic irony, narrative voice and, in some cases, the quiet conviction that an examiner somewhere is personally invested in their use of the word ‘liminal’.

Parents are breathing freely again.  Students are sleeping in and going to bed before the witching hours.  English tutors are surfacing from the annual storm of essay plans, mock feedback, last-minute quotation surgery and messages beginning, ‘Sorry, I know it’s late, but could you just quickly look at…’

My summer plans are shaping up nicely. Pool for puppy.

This exam season went from ‘nicely busy’ to 7am (for me) online Hong Kong starts at an impressive speed.  One minute we were calmly discussing revision schedules and the joy of a comparative pivot. The next, I was moving between Othello, King Lear, The Handmaid’s Tale, Romantic poetry, Shamsie, Ishiguro, Ibsen, Miller, Han Kang, Keats, Atwood and the small but persistent matter of why ‘context’ does not mean dropping in a sentence about patriarchy and hoping for the best.

But now that the dust has settled, I keep coming back to one thing: the students who walked into the exam hall with the greatest confidence were not simply the students who knew the most.  They were the students who had learnt how to think for themselves.

The strongest students this year (and every year) were the ones who could turn knowledge into argument.  They could take a complex idea, choose the right evidence, and explain why a writer’s choices mattered and the context and critical views supported their argument, not worked instead of it.  They understood that an essay question is never, ‘Tell me everything you know about this text’, rather it is an act of selection, judgement and control.

In a world increasingly anxious about AI, the ability to think independently, read closely, make connections, test interpretations and write with authority is not an optional extra.  It is the point.  A strong English student is someone who can ask better questions, notice complexity, handle ambiguity and build an argument that belongs to them.  They are the ones you will want to employ.

Confidence comes from a trust in your own thinking.  Not memorising a pre-packaged essay and praying that the question behaves itself; not adding context at the end of a paragraph like an anxious Victorian chaperone; not sprinkling in the word ‘liminal’ and hoping sophistication will occur.  Confidence comes from trust.  Some students went into the exam hall this year not just with revision behind them, but with confidence, clarity and the beginnings of a lifelong desire to read.  

Not immediately, obviously.   First, chocolate and a box set.