I was good at exams and rubbish at homework/organisation/punctuality/attendance/anything resembling hard work and diligence.
Despite thoroughly enjoying games, dance, swimming, cricket, running and all the rest of it at primary, I was dreadful at anything sports related and it all became a bit grim once in secondary, leading to an abhorrence for organised PE that lingers to this day. As a result I carefully chose courses for maximum timetable inconvenience and thus escaped most compulsory competitive torture, leading to my GCSEs in music (scraped a C having paid for my own private piano lessons during the course as I didn't play an instrument at the start of the 2 years and needed to do a practical exam...) and drama (taken during the 6th form).
French was easily the subject I was 'best' at in that it took zero effort to waltz my way through GCSEs, A level and the first year of uni at the top of my classes (which earned me a tidy sum in book tokens etc at annual prize givings over the years) and even after that the work required to get through the french bit of my degree was generally good fun. Apart from the dissertation bit of the year abroad, which I never got round to actually writing.
Maths didn't get tricky until the A level, although I didn't bother to do anything about the increased trickiness until after the spectacular fail in my mock where I got a 'U'. My teachers lied on my report, and told my parents that I got 9% on the exam. Now, even with my lack of any effort or work in maths, I knew enough about averages to tell that wasn't quite correct as I'd in fact got the 9% on the pure maths paper. Alongside a big fat zero on the stats one, since I had written my name at the top, read the paper over and over (and over) again and realised I didn't actually have a clue how to even start to tackle a single question on it. In the following 2 months of study leave I taught myself the entire pure maths syllabus and had got about a third of the way through the stats course by the time the exams came around. Got that U up to a D overall which is still my proudest academic achievement ever - particularly given that even if every single thing I wrote on the stats paper was correct, having attempted every part of any question I thought I vaguely had a clue about, I might have scraped about 30% on that paper so to get the D overall I must have completely nailed the pure maths one....
Despite thoroughly enjoying games, dance, swimming, cricket, running and all the rest of it at primary, I was dreadful at anything sports related and it all became a bit grim once in secondary, leading to an abhorrence for organised PE that lingers to this day. As a result I carefully chose courses for maximum timetable inconvenience and thus escaped most compulsory competitive torture, leading to my GCSEs in music (scraped a C having paid for my own private piano lessons during the course as I didn't play an instrument at the start of the 2 years and needed to do a practical exam...) and drama (taken during the 6th form).
French was easily the subject I was 'best' at in that it took zero effort to waltz my way through GCSEs, A level and the first year of uni at the top of my classes (which earned me a tidy sum in book tokens etc at annual prize givings over the years) and even after that the work required to get through the french bit of my degree was generally good fun. Apart from the dissertation bit of the year abroad, which I never got round to actually writing.
Maths didn't get tricky until the A level, although I didn't bother to do anything about the increased trickiness until after the spectacular fail in my mock where I got a 'U'. My teachers lied on my report, and told my parents that I got 9% on the exam. Now, even with my lack of any effort or work in maths, I knew enough about averages to tell that wasn't quite correct as I'd in fact got the 9% on the pure maths paper. Alongside a big fat zero on the stats one, since I had written my name at the top, read the paper over and over (and over) again and realised I didn't actually have a clue how to even start to tackle a single question on it. In the following 2 months of study leave I taught myself the entire pure maths syllabus and had got about a third of the way through the stats course by the time the exams came around. Got that U up to a D overall which is still my proudest academic achievement ever - particularly given that even if every single thing I wrote on the stats paper was correct, having attempted every part of any question I thought I vaguely had a clue about, I might have scraped about 30% on that paper so to get the D overall I must have completely nailed the pure maths one....
), but the teachers were all bastards and I had no intention of crawling around them. I didn`t like them, so I made zero effort!
