Читать книгу How to Fail - Elizabeth Day - Страница 9

When I went to that secondary school in England, I got really good at exams. I was more content, had better teachers and had already done half the year back in Belfast. At GCSE, I promptly dropped all the subjects I didn’t like without a backward glance. I became a straight-A student and my end-of-term reports were glowing with praise.

This was lucky because it felt as if I were constantly being made to take tests. Life was a morass of exams – weekly tests to check I’d learned my algebra and understood photosynthesis; end-of-term exams where the sun beat tauntingly through the classroom windows as I attempted to revise the finer points of Henry IV’s domestic policy; musical grades; GCSEs; A levels … it went on and on. And then, because I’d been studying so hard and straining my eyes poring over books and the library computer screens, it turned out I needed an eye test (and glasses) too.

The culture of continuous testing has got even worse since I left school in 1997. In 2018, the charity Childline reported delivering 3,135 counselling sessions on exam stress in the previous year, with half of those phone calls being with twelve- to fifteen-year-olds, some of whom spoke of ‘an overwhelming workload’ and ‘worries about whether they would get the grades they want’.

The sheer number of exams – from SATs to GCSEs to AS and A levels and beyond – means that, at some point, you will probably fail at least one and your sense of self risks being reduced to a series of red biro marks on foolscap and a percentage point informing you that you haven’t passed.

It’s hard not to take it personally. At my new school, the spectre of that 47 per cent Chemistry exam result in Belfast cast a long shadow. I’m not sure why it haunted me so. That particular test wasn’t of any great importance but it was still difficult to separate who I was as a person from the grotesque caricature I built up in my mind of a backward numbskull who couldn’t remember what happened to magnesium when it met a naked flame (did it ask it to put some clothes on? I wondered).

Why did that particular failure affect me so deeply? It was partly because my surgeon father was an excellent scientist and was forever trying to engage me in ‘experiments’. I remember once, at the age of seven, being encouraged to take a dead bat to my primary school for display on the Nature Table. Until this point, the Nature Table had consisted of shrivelled autumn leaves and the odd branch of pussy willow, each one neatly labelled in Mrs McCarter’s comforting round handwriting.

I had found the bat that morning in our attic, its furry black body lying like a winged comma on the floorboards. When I told my father, he was delighted, and took the opportunity to give me an informative little talk on the nature of nocturnal flight. He told me to wrap up the bat in kitchen roll and take it into school. My classmates would be fascinated, he said confidently – a dead bat was just the sort of thing the Nature Table needed.

He was mostly right. The other pupils were fascinated, although their fascination was somewhat ghoulish in tone and the majority of the girls were just plain terrified. Mrs McCarter recoiled in horror when I carefully unfolded the kitchen roll and offered up the dead bat in the damp palm of my hand.

It turned out the bat was not dead after all, but simply sleeping deeply, in a state of semi-hibernation. The drive to school and the subsequent commotion had woken the creature up and it leapt from my hands and started flying around the classroom, flapping its wings and causing Mrs McCarter to shriek in distress.

It was Liam Andrews who saved me: a boy who had been the subject of my fervent but unrequited crush for many months. Bravely, he shepherded the bat out through an open window. Everyone clapped. The Nature Table was restored to its former pussy-willowed glory. The bat was never mentioned again. And Liam Andrews thought I was a freak for the rest of my time at primary school.

The point being: my father was keen on science and, sweetly, he wanted me to share his enthusiasm. But I just didn’t have that kind of brain. I found it frustrating having to learn properties of chemicals by rote and I didn’t really want to know the inner workings of a rat or how heat was conducted through a baked potato. So when I got that 47 per cent in Chemistry, I felt it not only as an academic failure, but also as if I were, in some small but significant way, failing as a daughter. I was letting him down, as well as myself.

Tests are never just tests. They tap into all sorts of deeper issues too.

Looking back now, I also see that exam as symptomatic of my broader unhappiness. I had lost confidence socially after that episode with Siobhan, which meant I’d also lost confidence in my abilities. And when I knew I wasn’t good at something, I became less motivated. It’s a fairly standard human impulse: if I’m not going to succeed at this, the reasoning goes, then I’m not going to try. That way, I’ll lessen the humiliation when, inevitably, it comes.

But when I became better at exams, being ‘academic’ was something that wormed its way into my identity and into how I saw myself. I was rewarded and praised for it. This was beneficial in some ways – I worked hard because I wanted to keep on succeeding – but it also came with some negatives attached. It’s never a particularly good idea to build your sense of self on the shaky foundations of academic merit. The older you get, the more you realise that such markers are pretty arbitrary – especially in the arts subjects I’d chosen to pursue.

The author Jessie Burton came to this realisation as an adult after a lifetime spent doing well at school and cultivating ‘an intellectual maturity [that] can mask vulnerability’.

In her thirties, ‘I’d never, perhaps, tuned in emotionally. And I do think it has come from a more or less self-imposed state of doing. Doing things that garner applause or garner approval and therefore make me feel safe.

‘I think it was a pattern that was made way back when I was young and doing well at school and for most children, that’s our life … at age five, we’re at school a lot more than probably we’re at home … and that was always rewarding me. I did enjoy school; I loved it. And feeling that there was a formula there of working hard and getting the results and getting everyone’s approval and everything in the status quo being maintained.’

The flip side of this was that Burton ‘felt a lot of the love I got was conditional [on doing well academically] … and when The Miniaturist [her first novel] was hugely successful, the biggest success I’ve ever had, it was almost too much. “Well, I’ve tried to write a book and, oh, it’s an international bestseller.” What now? Who am I?’

As Burton so perceptively outlined, school achievements and exam results are only ever external validations. In my experience, they do not make you feel confident in any long-lasting way because, by the time you’ve left school or graduated from university, you realise that there are no exams left to take unless you’re an architect or a doctor or one of those high-flying financial types who keep having to sit complicated accountancy tests.

When you’re a grown-up, life becomes bafflingly free of signposts. There is no exam board telling you whether you’re doing well or meeting the necessary requirements for being a twenty-five-year-old. There’s no one who can give you an A* for moving house efficiently or managing to file your tax return on time. Sure, you can be given promotions and pay rises, but these are often scattered and random events. There is no long, anticipatory build-up of revision to an eventual climax of essay-writing against the clock as an invigilator walks up and down between rows of desks and tells you that you have five minutes left.

In adulthood, no one gives you marks for getting the answer right.

I wish I’d been more aware of this. At seventeen, I thought exams were all-important. I got my work in on time and I prided myself on being good. Good at school. Good at debating. Good at behaving. Good at not smoking a cigarette until my eighteenth birthday, and then only taking a single drag because it seemed a symbolic thing to do. Good at not getting my ears pierced. Good at talking to adults. Good at seeming outwardly confident, despite the rumbling internal engine of anxiety. I was even fairly good at the trumpet – as long as I didn’t have to take a test (I managed Grade 6 before realising there is nothing more stressful than a music exam which requires you to stand in front of a stranger, regulate your shallow breathing, and blow loudly into a brass tube blindly hoping to hit the right note and realising there is nowhere to hide if you don’t). Still, I was good at being the school Orchestra Secretary, which was the next best thing.

But then I took my driving test. And I failed.

No big deal, you might think. Worse things happen at sea. But this failure hit me especially hard. It came at a time when I was passing all the other tests in my life, and applying to Cambridge University, where I would later get a place. These socially sanctioned successes had led to a belief that I could do things I set my mind to because – let’s not mince words here – I was spoiled. I was white, middle-class, had attentive parents and had won a scholarship to an excellent boarding school where opportunities were handed out like doughnuts at break-time (we did actually get doughnuts every Thursday). I thought that if I put enough time in, worked hard, did my best and if my parents threw money at any given problem, success would automatically follow. It was the logic of entitlement and I’m aware that countless people from different backgrounds, who have experienced discrimination for everything from their ethnicity to their sexuality, will find this a curiously slight example. And it was. But it’s the slightness that revealed the sheer depth of my arrogance.

I was arrogant about my driving test. Not because I thought I was an exceptional driver – I really, really wasn’t and my lack of spatial awareness means I can still barely parallel park – but because I thought success in tests was a perfect equation of effort multiplied by intelligence equals reward. I also knew that all my family – mother, father and older sister – had passed their test first time. In fact, my sister was a driver of such skill that later she took an Advanced Driving Test in order to qualify for lower insurance premiums and a lifetime of making all her romantic partners feel slightly emasculated (she’s also an excellent map-reader, motorcyclist, pilot and shooter of rifles, having once represented her country in precisely this sport. My cousins, not without reason, call her Jane Bond).

Being the youngest in a high-achieving family means you’re left scrabbling to keep up. In many ways, this was a gift – it gave me determination and a die-hard work ethic. In other ways, it meant I was more likely to take it to heart when I failed in areas that my parents or sister had already succeeded.

So it was with the driving test. Having done twenty lessons with long-suffering Bob, my driving instructor and a man blessed with the innate calmness and patience of a Buddhist monk, I felt wholly prepared. I had passed my theory test after swotting up on motorway lights and highway road signs. All that was left was the practical element – and how hard could that be?

Pretty hard, as it turned out.

I was paired with a stern-faced female examiner, the sort of person whose head seemed to have been chipped off an Easter Island statue, except less expressive. She was impervious to any effort at small talk or charm. Well, that’s fine, I thought, I’ll just drive brilliantly and she’ll be forced to crack a smile by the end.

For the first twenty minutes, everything went according to plan. I can honestly say, with the benefit of over two decades of driving cars, that it was quite possibly the best bit of driving I have ever done. Three-point turns were executed seamlessly. The emergency stop was deftly handled. Roundabouts held no fear. I indicated with grace, checked my wing mirrors as if born to the task and bowled smoothly along the roads trailed by songbirds whistling a merry tune.

Then, on our return to the test centre, the instructor motioned that I should go up a steep hill. I chuckled to myself. Hill starts were my forte. I’d learned to drive in Malvern, which is renowned for two things: its spring water and its gradients. Back at home in Ireland, we lived at the bottom of a valley. Navigating inclines was a way of life.

The car chuntered up to the brow of the hill. At the top, there was a traffic light and a column of cars waiting to turn into the main road. I slowed, stopped and pulled on the handbrake with full force. But then – calamity! – the car rolled back. It was just a few centimetres, and I stopped before hitting the car behind, but I already knew this was an automatic fail. Despite the blemish-free drive up to this point, I was going to be judged on this single moment of not-good-enough.

I drove back to the test centre and saw Bob, peering hopefully at me from the car park. I gave him a shake of the head and could tell he was already gearing up to say it can’t have been that bad.

The examiner turned to me, un-clicked her seatbelt and uttered the words ‘I regret to inform you …’ as if she were a telegram boy delivering news of a dead soldier on the Western Front. I slumped out of the car and Bob patted me on the arm and said it was just a bit of bad luck. He drove me back to school, where I used up what was left of my BT charge card to wail down the phone at my mother, who was nonplussed by my disproportionately melodramatic reaction.

‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘You can take the test again. Plenty of people do.’

She was right, of course. It was simply that by failing this test, the persona I’d built for myself based on passing exams came crumbling down. It dawned on me, as if for the first time, that perhaps I wasn’t guaranteed a pass through life purely because I was good at getting ‘A’s or because my parents had invested money in helping me to do so.

When I interviewed the memoirist and journalist Dolly Alderton for the podcast, she had a similar experience when she failed to get into Bristol University. Like me, she had been lucky enough to be sent to a private school, something that struck her as ‘the most wildly unfair thing in the world’.

‘I’m not an academic person,’ she said. ‘I was pretty lazy, and I came out with tremendous results that 100 per cent I wouldn’t have got had I not been at a private school. I truly believe and know that in my heart, because it’s actually really hard to be a failure at private school because you’re paying this extraordinary amount of money to be in these tiny classes, normally, to have a huge amount of time and focus and resources spent on you.

‘I think it’s so unfair that a girl like me, who would have just completely fallen through the cracks, I think, in any other schooling environment, manages to have these great opportunities and excel in a way that isn’t artificial, but was very much supported at every baby step of the way.’

Alderton passed her GCSEs, managing to get a C in Maths ‘even though it seemed like that was the most impossible thing’ and sailed through her schooling so that by the time it came to applying to universities, she was blessed with ‘this rock solid assurance that everything is going to be really easy in life, which I suppose is entitlement’.

When Bristol rejected her, ‘I just didn’t believe it. That’s the extent of how little I had faced failure in my life. Everything that I tried, my parents ploughed money in and time in to make sure that I just dragged my feet through it. Whether it was a ballet exam or getting into this boarding school for sixth form. Or my Maths GCSE. I just hadn’t experienced failure.

‘But yeah, it was a good lesson to me because it made me acknowledge the extent of my privilege and the curious and unfair and unusual education that I had. And to acknowledge that and realise that that’s not what the real world was going to be like.

‘And maybe it’s not just exclusive to people who were privately schooled, maybe it’s a sort of adolescent arrogance as well. But what a good lesson to learn!’

It is. Alderton ended up going to Exeter, so it’s not exactly an unremitting tale of woe. Nor was my driving-test failure. A few weeks went past, and I sat my test again. I had been randomly allotted the same examiner. The absurdity seemed to me so great that my nerves actually dissipated.

Interestingly, because I’d already failed and faced the entirely self-imposed indignity of that failure, I was liberated from my own expectations. My family now knew I was a rubbish driver, I thought, so there was no need to worry about letting anyone down. Besides, maybe continuing to fail my driving test over the coming years would become a loveable character quirk and I’d develop a hitherto untapped ditziness that people would find funny and charming.

So I embarked on my second driving test in a pleasant fog of couldn’t-give-a-shit-ness. I made legions of minor errors. I could see the instructor jotting them down on her clipboard and I still didn’t care. This time, when it came to the hill start, I glided smoothly away without any rollback but the minor errors kept piling up until her sheet of paper became blackened with tiny vertical hyphens.

I returned to the test centre and waited for the examiner to deliver the bad news.

‘I’m pleased to say …’ she started and I knew I’d passed.

The biggest lesson I took from it all was that the secret to succeeding at tests is not, actually, to get a fantastic mark. Succeeding at a test means not defining yourself according to the outcome. It means reminding yourself that you exist separately from those ticks in the margin and that most of life is an arbitrary collision of serendipitous or random events and no one is awarding you percentage points for how you live it.

Since then, I have tried to adopt this mindset, of someone who has made the effort to understand who they really are, what they care about and what their values are rather than what grades they think they deserve. After all, the person awarding those grades might simply be having a bad day or might not agree with what you believe about Prospero’s role in The Tempest or whether you think Richard III really did kill the Princes in the Tower (it was definitely Henry Tudor). But that doesn’t mean you’re a failure as a person.

Of course, that is not to say exams are unimportant. They are. They give you discipline and focus. Good results can be a conduit to a more expansive life with greater opportunities. They can get you into universities and fulfilling careers and they can give you confidence in your own abilities. I’m not one of those people who, every year when A-level results come out, takes to social media to pontificate pompously about how none of it really counts and, hey kids, I left school with an E in Snail Breeding and Advanced Crochet Work, but look at me now – I’m a C-list reality TV star with 120,000 followers on Twitter and a boohoo.com clothing line. No, I think exams are important. But I also think we need to keep them in perspective. No one deserves to pass a test simply because they believe they’re entitled to a positive result. Nor are we wholly defined by exams; it’s just that working hard and doing well at them can occasionally help us get to where we want to be.

And sometimes, if we don’t end up where we’d planned or we’re forced to confront the humiliation of a failed science exam or an undead bat flying around a classroom, it can make us understand all of the above.

That is its own kind of success.