It must have been a very strong epiphany that I experienced this afternoon. Making my bed, cleaning my table, re-making my bed, washing the dishes - nothing of that prevented me from succumbing to the pushy voice inside my head that was urging me get back to my notes for maturita. So I did. Eight hours, two coffees, and a yogurt later I can say that I posses a knowledge of one quarter (or rather one third, I don’t consider our high school English equipollent to math, social sciences or literature) material that will be featured on my leaving exams. That’s a pretty good result, considering it’s only Wednesday the 14th and I won’t sit for the exams until the 27th. It gives me a whole lot of time to precisely review the remaining subjects as well. I didn’t expect that.
Of course, the studying didn’t always go smoothly. I am still serious with my declaration of war against the “writers about the countryside” whose lack of importance is equalized by their quantity. After doing a simple math — multiplying those two variables — I unfortunately came to a conclusion that the great stories of women struggling with numerous babies and men worried about poor harvests can’t escape my attention. Nevertheless, the guild escaped my warfare; even the youngest one has been dead for about 100 years.
The above mentioned group of writers is an excellent example of what I believe is one of the few hundreds of problems in the Czech school system. Biographies of these unoriginal novelists and descriptions of their interchangeable plots take our time and resources from learning about something truly great. While they are a sole subject of one entire maturita topic, Walt Whitman or J.D. Salinger must accept only either a negligible or no coverage. We can’t explore deeply (through discussions, for example) any books because we don’t have time. The syllabi briefly expose us to the titans, but then delude our passion for them by flooding us with the details of native writers with marginal importance, even within our borders. That’s wrong but as always, the administration is pretending to be a dead bug when one, even a faculty member, brings it up.
I have developed a strategy based on statistics and probability in accordance of which I adjust my preparation. According to this model I should spend the most of the revision time with the “writers about the countryside” and medieval theater, which might turn psychologically damaging, but must inevitably result in a top final mark. Then I will forget about them…
