Halcyon youth?

Ever feel as though you're re-visiting your youth? Sadly, I don't mean the halcyon days of gazing out of the classroom at daisy filled meadows, sunshine filtering through the windows as you dream of ...or an endless round of parties and pubs, late nights and even later mornings.

It's exam time and I have daily reminders of distribution anomalies; conjunctive verbs; the importance of Piggy in Lord of the Flies; arguments for and against capital punishment; regressive taxation; lung disease, (there's a common link between the latter two that a geo-biologist with a zen for economics would relish); equations so complex that they feature only letters, and a few ( ) +s and - s and can you balance them - with a pair of scales maybe?

In this time when we are constantly told, and maybe in our smugness feel; that exams have been dumbed down and it's so much easier to get an A grade than it used to be, that taking exams in instalments over a number of years takes the pressure off the students; it seems to me that the 15-18 year olds have nothing but pressure piled on them from the moment they begin year 10 - although that start date varies, I have a 15 year old who took a first GCSE paper at the age of 13 and a bit; not because he's a child genius, but because the school decided it might be a good idea that year. They introduced a different policy by the time the next child reached the same stage, and it will be changing again shortly - well, why not?

My current gripe (I have many) is a comment I have ringing in my ears from teachers of an AS student, informing both of us that grammar needed to be worked on (French). Bearing in mind I was sitting in front of the very teachers that had taken this student through the 5 years to GCSE, I wondered when it was they planned on sorting out a problem they had only just perceived in a current class size of 5 pupils. My youngest, however, informs me that after nearly a year of learning a foreign language, they have yet to learn any verbs, at all. Therein lies the answer to my question.

Forgive the rant, although each year I become an expert in some of the above mentioned disciplines, sometimes the exam tension gets to we parents too!