For many of you November is a time for serious stuff. Particularly exams.
For many of you these will be the last exams of your school
years.
That can come as a great relief: you can put away your books, leave school and do some serious celebration before beginning the next stage of your life.
Some of you will simply enjoy the summer break before beginning tertiary studies. Others of you will take a gap year travelling, volunteering or working before returning to study or to wherever life takes you.
Whatever you do, this November marks the end of your school life and the beginning of a world full of possibilities. It is a time to enjoy.
But between you and the future lie the examinations. They can bring anxiety. A lot cam hang on them. The future you have in mind for yourself may hang on your exam results. Your results, too, depend in part on how you have worked during the last year, and on how your examiners judge your papers.
That can be a scary thought. Examinations are all about judgment – how others judge our performance. But they also often make us judge ourselves. If we do less well than we hope, it is easy to beat up on ourselves, to blame ourselves for not reaching our expectations of ourselves and to brood on all the things we might have done better.
That is all part of being disappointed. But it may be helpful to remember that examination results say very little that is important about us. They touch only a very small part of ourselves: the way we address particular questions other people ask of us.
They say nothing about how seriously we have worked, about how we have grown over our school years, about the kind of person we are becoming and how generous are our friendships.
These are the things that matter most deeply in our lives; they are the building blocks of our future selves. November is a time to look back with gratitude at what your school years have given you and to look forward with hope to the next stage of your journey.
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