Get me to the exam on time

When ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels roll around, you can always tell which of your friends have teenagers, because all they can talk about is the stress of it all. Who can blame them? It’s not only the tension which has been mounting for months to ensure that their kids are actually studying enough; many laid-back teenagers, as is their wont, will think of a million and one other things they “have” to do, rather than swot over their books, frittering away their time as the clock ticks, ticks, ticks as D-Day approaches. Meanwhile, the Mums, especially, are having mini nervous breakdowns.

If that is not enough to create a pressure cooker situation, parents are then faced with another hurdle. The hurdle of actually ferrying their kids to the right school for the right exam at the right time. Logistics have to be planned out carefully and scouting missions are dispatched prior to the day to locate the school where the exam is taking place, because it is invariably on the other side of the island and they have never heard of the school before. The more meticulous carry out a dry run, complete with stopwatch, to see how long it takes them from home to the exam location.

Those who work have to take time off, younger children are strapped in for the ride, and they firmly inform family and friends that for the next few weeks they will not be available. Their mission (and they have no choice but to accept it) is to get to the exam on time.

What they have not factored in, because it is impossible to do so is, of course, the extent of the colossal traffic, as practically everyone with children that age is doing exactly the same thing. So what you have on exam day are a slew of cars containing white-faced mothers, knuckles gripping the steering wheel with anxiety, stomach tied in knots, as they are stuck in one traffic jam after another, their cars inching along at a soul-destroying snail’s pace, as their teenagers for the first time start seriously worrying that they are not going to make it and all that studying will have gone down the drain.

Some mothers with several children of exam age are expected to drive the respective offspring to various locations and deposit them there to do their exam, all of which start at the same time. Is it any wonder that I’m reading anecdotes of so many people having meltdowns?

There can be nothing as anxiety-inducing as exams, but to have this kind of situation on a day when everyone’s nerves are already stretched to the breaking point, is verging on sadism.

Now I know we all went through it. Those of my generation took the bus to Valletta, walked it down to St Elmo and did most of our exams there. Maybe my memory is failing me but I don’t remember going to different schools for each exam. In any case, they were different times, traffic was not the nightmare it is today, and we could easily get to our exams on time because the transport system, rickety and smoke-belching as the buses were back then, actually worked pretty well.

Always an independent spirit, I actually enjoyed the fact that I was dealing with this important day on my own, with no parents breathing down my neck and making me even more nervous. I only remember a handful of times when they drove me there, probably because they had an errand in Valletta on that day and it just made sense, but most of the time, it never occurred to me to ask for a ride. Mine was not an isolated case, as could be witnessed by hordes of teenagers walking down Republic Street who all did the same – we made sure to allow plenty of time to get there and just got on with it.

Afterwards we would all break out of the exam room like prisoners freed from prison, to compare notes and ask each other how we did, the tense atmosphere finally broken by the relief that it was all over, at least until the next one. Gradually, we would make our way home by bus and that was that.

That is small comfort for today’s parents, of course. Fast forward to today and you have a tiny island of less than half a million people which has one car per head and a transport system which despite two consecutive governments trying out different foreign companies, is STILL not what it should be. Obviously, with all the traffic, our buses can never be on time, because, guess what? They’re stuck in all the traffic too. So the suggestion for students to take a bus to their exams to relieve the traffic congestion is met with incredulous disbelief: are you friggin’ kidding me?!

And to make it even more “exciting”, the exams in various subjects are now also being held all over the island (instead of one large centralized place) a system which has been in place for a while, from what I’ve gathered, but which surely needs to be re-thought. I honestly don’t understand why there is a need for this at all, as I’m a firm believer in keeping things simple rather than complicating them unnecessarily.

Which brings me to transport. Hundreds of students are sitting for exams in various subjects on the same day, so would it be that difficult to organize some kind of shuttle service from several catchment areas, where teenagers can board a mini-van which leaves at say, ten minute intervals, to take them to the centralized exam location?

The current situation of car after car after car containing the driver and a student, or at the most two, going from one side of the island to the other all at the same time on such a stressful day, just does not make sense. Especially when the island is already choked with traffic on any given ordinary day anyway. If there is even one accident on a main road on exam day, that could mean queues of cars which are stuck and unable to move. There is not enough Valium in the world to calm people down in such circumstances.

As with so many other issues, it is useless complaining and moaning without trying to come up with viable solutions. We have come to a point where we have to think of alternative transport options when there are these types of mass events which affect a large portion of the population. Simplify, centralize, provide frequent, specific transport, and maybe, just maybe teenagers can learn how to be independent again. And maybe Malta’s poor parents, whose lives have become fraught with tension, can finally breathe.