Column: Exam time just around the corner

This week and next, local high school students will be entrenched in final exams.

I can't say I envy them. For three days this week and three next week, students will have to put up or shut up in the classroom. All that material teachers threw at them back in September will come home to roost.

How well they paid attention to what was going on in the front of the classroom will go a long way in determining how they do during the high stakes exam game.

I was fairly attentive during high school, but every semester at exam time, I began to seat bullets over how best to prepare for an exam. The collection of facts, formulas and dates I had learned over the previous 18 weeks seemed to escape from my head like air from a flat tire.

The thought of cramming all that material back in my brain over the course of a week just seemed insurmountable.

I did most of my studying in my bedroom as a child. I had a desk in there where I could sit up straight and and spread my book and notebooks out and really dig in.

Of course, this was all BC (before computers and before cellphones) so I wasn't tempted to message my friends or surf the Internet. I didn't have a television in my room, so I could not watch reruns of Hogan's Heroes.

But I did have a radio and it was the bane of my father's existence. It wasn't that I played it too loud when I was studying. It was that I played it at all.

Of course, I poo-poohed my father's complaints and moped over to the radio to turn it off. But after a while, I just had to slip back over there and turn it back on.

Today, I walk in my children's rooms and check on them when they are studying and the radio is on full blast and the girls are singing.

I have become my father. I complain.

Oddly enough, they poo-pooh my complaints and mope over to their radios and turn them off.

I figure my kids chances of doing well on final exams is about like that proverbial ice cube in hell.

Still, children today do have things a little better than when their pop was in school.

We used to take exams in the morning, then go to our other clases for the remainder of the school day. Today's students get to leave school early. And the exam schedule is more spread out, like a college exam schedule, which means students seldom take more than one exam per day. Old folks, as my children like to call me, used to take two exams per day and, unless you were absent, you finished exams in three days time.

Regardless of the schedule, it'll be a high-pressure time for our young folks.

So if you are student taking exams this week, I'm feeling your pain.

If you're a parent of student taking exams, we'll, I'm really feeling your pain.