Where extraordinary becomes eccentric

1) I officially graduated. Or not really, because I wasn’t present at the ceremony and thus my diploma is still in the headmaster’s office. Why weren’t I at a once-in-a-lifetime ceremony?

2) Because I and my brother were fighting our way to win a four day trip to Amsterdam in July. One reason for our success, besides being two awfully good debaters, was that I developed a strategy that might have been immoral, but strictly adhered to the rules of that quazi-debate format. In short, we didn’t disclose our solution to the problem until the second — and last — speech of ours. Because the primary purpose of this format is not to make the two sides engage in argumentation, this was a perfectly legitimate way to deliver speeches.

3) I picked up golf. During my stay in the U.S. four years ago I played two rounds of nine holes, finishing each round with approximately 300 shots above par. But yesterday on the driving range the balls were flying in the right directions and into plausible distances, which motivated me to start golfing more intensively in the future. That will be another way to fill my free summer time.

More about each later.

Tuesday was fun. It all started with the right wake-up call; setting David Bowie’s live version of Alabama song as my alarm clock tune was one of the best moves I’ve done in a while. After a tasty breakfast and all the routine activities one indulges himself when he’s intending to leave the house, I was ready to excel. As arrogant as it might sound, it perfectly described my mood at the moment. I was wearing a rather comfortable suit with my favorite combo of a white shirt and red tie, making me look like Hitman who hasn’t seen his barber for a while, and the headphones were playing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy in full blast. What could possibly go wrong?

Those tidbits of healthy uncertainty and doubt from the previous night were gone; I became self-assured in my infallibility, I felt like Nick Naylor. The majority of others, however, felt differently. The hallway in front of the classroom where the exams were in progress resembled a busy street in New York — only the low number of individuals was compensated by the pace of their moves. People were cruising up and down the corridor, raising their eyebrows periodically in searches for the forgotten name of a man who founded the humanistic psychology or that nationalistic verse our late-19th century poet wrote while drunk, sometimes mumbling quietly the answer in satisfaction, other times quietly but distinctively uttering a swear word and swinging their arms in desperation. Although not a single one of our classmates by that time (as a matter of fact, none of our classmates failed, that made us the most “successful” class in the past five years I believe), too many people were filled with tension, were being crushed by stress (isn’t it ironic that one of the topics in psychology was how to battle stress and why stress is bad for your body?), and many seemed generally unhappy.

The procedures in our maturita exams are rather simple: one draws a number, gets 15 minutes to prepare on his own, and then speaks for 15 minutes in front of the Board of Great Inquisitors (there still are disputes over the correct name of the board, this one is derived from a 15th-century book on education that was partly damaged during a flood of 1823; or so do many believe it can’t be otherwise). While the preparation might produce fruitful outcomes, it’s usually the subsequent delivery that makes one succeed less. The Czech students are not used to officially speaking aloud in front of anyone but their contemporaries, and the shaky voice, which every debater remembers from his first debates, unofficially takes points off their score. I think it’s quite unfair that we’re never practicing speaking as such, because the style delivery is what counts in favor of a better grade when the committee is vacillating. Perhaps it’s the stress and fright of unknown that worsens one’s performance.

During each of my 15 minutes designated for preparation I was listening to a poor girl who came before me. She was the person in whom the characteristics described above mixed. When I got an embarrassingly easy question for English (”My Life & Future Career” - how ridiculous), she got “Global Problems” which gave her great shivers. When I was to speak about historical prose, she had to elaborate on the works of few provincial poets whose memories only live in the notes of maturants and the sheets of paper covered in dust in the basements of local archives. Honestly, she didn’t do well in any of the exams I listened to. It might sound harsh and aloof, but she was supposed to fail at least her history exam, if not English as well; the claim that Japan fought the U.S. and France in 1905 as a part of its hunt for colonies was followed by many that shared the same amount of absurdity. But she passed, and so did two other souls the day before. who did equally terribly.

That’s what bothers me. In case of maturita it’s the pass or no-pass verdict that matters. You either have a high school diploma or not. No one cares about the grades you get; a high school graduate with 4.0 GPA is equal to a graduate with 1.0, the lowest passing grade. Apparently, trying does not count much to your advantage, there is no reward for trying. I would have felt embarrassed if I got 1.0 GPA, but other than in my memories this regrettable result would never be taken against me.

So the only way the excellent and average can be distinguished from the below average and terrible is failing the latter. It’s harsh but that’s the only way we can battle the current inflation of degrees. When everyone is allowed to receive a degree (or in case of high school a honorable title of a high school graduate), its value is diluted and it no longer serves the original purpose - to show that this person truly demonstrated an ability to successfully cope with an overabundance of facts that needed to be learned. If only a part of a part of the overabundance is known, it can’t be on par with the knowledge of the entire overabundance. The status quo makes us all equal, but education isn’t law where equality is the key concept. Education should be like a flexible caste-system, where the rights and obligations depended upon one’s qualities. This didn’t happen in our maturita, and is not happening elsewhere either.

From the very beginning I knew maturita won’t be about sweat and blood as the teachers claimed. Three months ago such claims only rendered subtle smiles on my face, but they now worry me. When people with such dramatically different levels of knowledge and abilities are put together, isn’t it discriminating?

Thankfully my further educational path will continue overseas. While the level of education in the Czech Republic bothers me, its malfunctioning logic probably won’t affect me directly. Or so I hope.

All in all, I am fairly happy with the result of my exams; I passed all four of them with A’s, thus earning honors on the final marksheet. Although my topics belonged among the easier ones, they were fairly assigned to me by a draw, and I excelled in them. My boasting self-confidence allowed me to crack jokes about various authors and about myself, and I enjoyed that. I was hoping for more sweat and blood, I was hoping the exams will be more like they were described by our teachers, according to which I adjusted my preparations. But it wasn’t to be. It’s unnecessary to cry over unspilled milk. Thus I am now retiring back to work and The Selfish Gene which now entertains me. I excelled and that was fun.

Or at least not completely lost. It is in a state from which ever stronger force won’t move it.

I am going to watch an episode of Seinfeld, then double check whether I have everything for tomorrow and then head to bed. My inner clock got confused over the Saint Week, causing me to fall asleep no sooner than at 3am, which would be a little impractical tomorrow.

The game has begun. This morning we all gathered in the special “Maturita room” where we were introduced to the head of the commission (a mighty and unpredictable woman whose vote has veto power) and were given encouragements from our teachers and each other. The funny thing was that not only the students but also the teachers had their faces turned pale and some (our jocular chemistry TA) were visibly shaking from fright.

But so far my class has done well — all four people have passed; some more, some less successfully. I don’t know about the afternoon batch yet, but I am more skeptical. I am a nice, supportive classmate, aren’t I?

Meanwhile I realized that a shot of beautifully translucent Havana rum can cure the anxiety and stress resulting from the brutal realizations about the states of affairs. While it’s rather tasty and quick-acting, the “side effects” of lessened ability to concentrate and induced drowsiness make the rum consumption for this purpose unfeasible in the long run.

Now I know why everyone has been preparing for his or her maturita for weeks — there’s quite a bit of content to absorb. But I still have 36 hours before the exam and there’s only a few more chapters to go. But all in all, this week I’ve spent more time studying than in the past year altogether.

The clock signaled complications and it was only my ability to quickly find plausible explanations that would justify my today’s choice of priorities. Today I decided that my priority was relaxation. After all, four days of relentless studying loudly called for a day off, which would allow the brain cells to sort out the all knowledge they’ve absorbed during the past days. I am in no hurry either.

So it was 11.45pm and I was sitting in front of my computer; the sheet of paper next to my mouse looked almost immaculate, had it not been for the few lines of thin blue ink that upon closer examination formed a goniometric equation, yet I had no regrets. I was initially intending to watch a movie, a movie that would be funny, lucid and still intelligent, something like Charlie Wilson’s War, but no such piece of art was available. Just to authorize a new “buddy” that was trying to gain his place in my ICQ friends list, I logged into the application but wasn’t quick enough to escape the prompt message from my classmate with whom I gladly started a conversation. The movie could wait, couldn’t it?

One of my clients later came online too, so we spent over an hour by looking for a 3D figure that he could use on his company cars – something easily recognizable, something positive, something with the right balance between the conservatism and hip. We finally settled on a white robot-like shape with a spherical head with no eyes, nose or actually any face at all. Its advantage lied in the wide variety of actions it was depicted in. The cars will probably feature the yet unnamed robot holding the planet Earth, suggesting the whole world would be in your hands if you bought the internet service from XYZ Inc. The website homepage will show the robot speaking on the phone (although it has no mouth), maybe also watching TV (we’ll have to figure out how to make the TV look digital, because that’s our niche). It will be pretty cool.

Then another friend joined the discussion and it was fun again. Then another. Those two hours flew by so quickly! Suddenly it was almost midnight.

I wonder whether my classmates have also already decided to step away from the books and engage in some unwinding activity. From the updates I received from three of them, they feel they are considerably behind the schedule and therefore sentenced to failure. They certainly don’t sound optimistic, they expect the worst and short pause is a forbidden fruit.

And that’s a wrong attitude! Although I have oftentimes doubted it, a vast majority of them is smart and capable of nailing the exams. Unfortunately, the system, ran by the teachers and parents, forces them to believe that passing the leaving exams is impossible, which results into their outbursts of moments of desperations and depressions. Before our final mark-sheets were handed to us on Friday, the head teacher urged us to utilize every moment of the saint week for studying. There was no “otherwise” in her short speech, but everyone could infer that had there been a second part of the sentence, it would have included words like “damnation” and “collapse of the solar system.” How wrong was that!

We’ve spent the last four years studying hard. Some of us more, some of us less, but if we compare the amount of stuff we’ve learned with the majority of other schools, we’ll come on top. Even if we’ve completely forgotten everything, there would still be the rigorous reviews we’ve done in the past three months in virtually every subject. There’s no reason why the homes of my classmates should be filled with the stress and tension as much as they are now.

I’m looking forward for this frenzy to be all over. Not because I was too worried about my own performance, but because my classmates are exposed an unnecessary and unfair amount of stress. This time next year, we’ll all be assuring the members of the graduating class that everything will be ok, but they’ll not believe us. Only because their teachers would be telling them that taking a day off equals to a losing of the most critical day of your life, consequences of which will be fatal. And that’s wrong.

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…

Since all of my classmates have already been devouring the numerous maturita-preparation materials for several weeks, I decided I should take an action as well. Thus today I began preparing - the first step consisted of printing out everything that should be memorized in next 19 days. I’d start reading it, but the latest issue of The Economist is out online…

Update 10.41pm: My productivity growth certainly must have outpaced the one of the American workers, because I was able to finish all articles related to my field of interest, and also categorize all of my notes  for the exams (roughly 500 pages). Step 2 done, Step 3 will follow tomorrow.

I don’t know whether this is common or typical to even the Czech school system, but it’s certainly peculiar to the school I attend.

My friend sent me her preparation materials for our maturita exam with and asked me to review them. I randomly opened one of the 20 Word files, about the prose of the 1st half of the 20th century, and it struck me immediately:

“Marcel Proust - The Search for the Lost Time: inspired by Proust’s memory of dipping cookies in the tea.”

I recall this cookie-and-tea frenzy from two years ago rather well. Whenever anyone’s subject of the oral examination turned to Proust, the unlucky student quickly connected one and one and fired:”Proust, that’s the guy who dipped cookies into the tea!”

During my high school career I’ve noticed the teachers’ tendencies to simplify subjects to this level. Korea was solely about chaebols and any topic in biology always digressed to its effects on global warming.

With the maturita approaching, all those painful memories are arising again. Oh no…