It's over

The exam was earlier today, and with it came the close of one cycle and my first ever A-Levels as a teacher. There won't be many of those. As for the paper, well, let's just say that History examiners, of all people, should know what it means to respect dates and their constraints on the syllabus. Section B was do-able however. And our scripts, relative to those of others, should be of higher quality.

Interestingly enough, I came across one of my A-Level papers today, along with the examiner's reports for both papers, hidden away in a dusty green file that Mrs Sng left behind when she left all those years ago. I can't remember the questions that I attempted, except for the piracy one, which to this day I have no idea how I managed, given that it was not something we covered in class at all. Then again, back then we were a lot more independent-minded. All my knowledge came from books (Weiss, Forsythe, and Coate on the UN, Jonathan Spence and Immanuel Hsu on China, this huge volume on East and Southeast Asia specifically for A-Level students), articles (Foreign Affairs had this nice one on the nationalities problem in post-Soviet Russia, while all I knew about world trade came from this one article from the Economist), and random stuff off the Internet (this was before Wikipedia). Making the transition to university life was easier as a result. I'm not sure it will be -- academically at least -- for a lot of this generation.
Posted by kungfuzi at 6:39 pm |