Study leave

J is doing mock GCSEs at the moment, says so far they've 'gone ok' but then he always says that and usually they have but just occasionally ... I on the other hand always used to say I'd done terribly. This rebounded on me the first time I did my Chemistry A-level. I had managed to spend 2 years of Chemistry lessons not getting to grips with the subject at all. In fact I could pretty much be said to have learnt nothing except that if you accidentally added sodium carbonate instead of sodium hydroxide to the test tube during a certain test it would violently react and the tube contents would shoot into the bottle turning the contents bright green. Also if, while heating a test tube it boiled over and the contents shot across the room and hit the teacher in his beard, he too would violently react.Also that the super-calm, slightly creepy, my-one-ambition-in-life-is-to-be-head-boy (who actually became a lot nicer once he realised he never would be head boy) was not at all super calm when he set the bench on fire. Anyway on Paper 1 of my A-level exam there were 20 questions. I answered 3. All complete guesses. 'I've failed Chemistry,' I said to my Dad. 'You always say that, you've done fine,' he replied.

So yes I failed abysmally, retook it and spent most of the next year still not understanding it. Then one evening just a few weeks before the exam I was poring over a text book and suddenly it clicked. Just like that I understood Chemistry and to everyone's astonishment got a really good grade.

Of course J is a natural super whiz at Chemistry. Doesn't get it from me. At parents' evening though, when the teacher addresses all his comments to P and ignores me I get this urge to say 'I have got an A-level you know, I do know what an alkane is, or even an alkene or alkyne and unlike you I was alive back there in those days when they were just beginning to talk about spd orbitals and electron clouds'. But I don't. I just sit there in my wheelchair trying to look intelligent.

Anyway it's a funny sort of fortnight, taking J into school at strange times of day. On Tuesday we took pity on him doing 2 English exams  & went and took him for lunch in a cafe between Eng Lang and Eng Lit. Today he's been home all day 'revising' although for a break we did go and do a bit of Christmas shopping. He's got a 'real' German GCSE exam tomorrow, really hope he does know it as well as he says. Of course he'll say it 'went ok'.