One down, 73 (ish) to go

Back to school then.

There I was on Monday, freshly ironed shirt, shoes shining like the sun, my satchel polished and an apple in my bag ready to give to teacher. The only thing that put a crimp on the day was having to go in for the morning shift to sit an exam. I wasn't too concerned, the assessment was in business accounts and I had performed above average on those throughout the course. My revision had gone well and I had sat a mock exam the day before which I had finished in 47 minutes-not bad for a 90 minute paper. I reckon it should be a piece of widdle...hang on, is that the distant sound of something rapidly approaching to bite me in the harris?

First thing, predictably I had a poor nights sleep. This is not remotely unusual and is going to be a tough part of the year for me (maybe the hardest part)-even a minor unimportant test/presentation gives me anxiety attacks-so I reckon that as the real things approach my eyes are going to get really sunken from lack of kip and I'm going to be a tad wired...

And yes, I am on medication. Beta blockers to stabilise the heartrate. Useless-I might as well take smarties...

Anyhow, being a little early I decided to take a trip to the mens room to wash my face and put a fresh shirt on.

Point of interest: The phrase 'smell of fear'-I now know what the smell of fear is-the men's room was full of it. And I thought that I was worried about the exam...You could have powered a nuclear submarine on the amount of nervous energy that was being released. The sailors would have suffocated from methane poisoning but that's another story.

So, leaving that room very quickly, I headed off to the exam-there was a tiny bit of a misunderstanding. We have been told that all exams will be sat anonymously, i.e. we only have to put a candidate number on the paper and nothing else that could distinguish us (give or take handwriting). So, whilst looking for my number I came across a card with my name on it, but luckily my foolish thought were easily put right. Yes, we are anonymous writers but we do have to have a way to find our desks...Put it down to the nerves and lack of sleep...

And I was on edge-that's the truth. Only once I had started the exam and couldn't get my accounts to balance ( a cardinal sin) did I realise that I was panicking. Luckily I had the time to sort out my mess (thank goodness for the person who told me to do my accounts in pencil!), put in all the bits I had missed and get it to balance, whilst keeping it pretty neat (for once).
The accounts take up the majority of the paper (56 marks out of 100 so I was very keen to do my best on that bit. Hopefully I scored about 40+ there which should leave me very little to do to pick up those last 10 or so to pass the paper. The rest of the paper was pretty horrendous (I should have got more than 10 nevertheless).

The only bright bit of the rest of it was that I found the 'conduct question' and answered it appropriately using the right chapter and verse from the 'the solicitors Code of Conduct'. Not only because it was points in the bag for this question but also because it goes forward to my ongoing, pervasive conduct score.
Conduct is measured in 2 ways-40% from little snippets in questions that crop up during the year and 60% in an exclusive conduct assessment. It would be good to go into an exam knowing that I have 25-30 of those 'freebie' points stacked up already and that's my aim.

As I've mentioned, I have mocks coming up in about 11-12 days. I'm not bothered about those (though I imagine that my sleep pattern will be shot-but I do want to pick up any conduct points that arise in those as well-it's the only point of doing them really, I know that I will crash and burn big time-I always do in mocks). Traditionally I do very well in the final exams (and badly during the year) and I am sure that I am a little too old to change that now...

We had a break of about 2 hours and then into the workshop-yes, even on the day of an important exam we have a class.
I have absolutley no idea what it was about-the whole thing rolled over me like a thick duvet. Something to do with houses I think. I should point out that although I was one of the walking dead-I was only one of them, we actually had a class full. Let's just say that the tutor earned his money that day and leave it at that.

Tax law on Tuesday-another good one for me. I do enjoy getting to play around with a calculater. It is strange though that so many of the class do struggle with numbers-most of the calculations we do are a little more than a couple of additions and a couple of subtractions with the odd multiplication thrown in-yet it throws most of the class.

Weird.

The only thing that I can think of is that it seems that I'm the only one to have come from a scientific background-most people who do law seem to choose either arts or social science 'A' levels. (I did physics, chemistry and maths-but it was 24 years ago (I've found that if you say it fast, it seems much more recent)

This week, we have to choose our electives. During the third term, our work load drops a little and we concentrate on 3 subjects (electives) that interest us/are important to our futures/what our employers want. I chose mine about 3 months back and although having wobbled a bit haven't actually wavered from that choice. Since I'm still in the Public Legal Services optional workshops (first one this week!) I have to choose 2 from 4 based around public work-so I've opted for;

Advanced Criminal; and
Welfare, Benefits and Immigration law

and a bit of employment law (even though I cant actually type 'employment'-it always comes out as emplyment) . Thank goodness for spell checkers...

On Thursday I picked up a sheet describing the WBI law course and I quote,
Tick the following boxes if they apply to you, to do really well on this course you need to be able to tick all the boxes.

• " I don't allow my exam nerves to affect my performance in the exam"
• "I don't have a problem with working fast and efficiently under time pressure in exam conditions"
• NB The final exam is perhaps the most demanding of all the elective exams.
  

OOPs, bugger...

The reason that I mentioned this out of order is because we don't know for certain who teaches what course-except we found out that the aggressive tutor from revenue teaches one of the most popular choices (not one of my choices by the way) and a great many of my classmates are considering changing their elective just to avoid her (even though she is only one of three tutors on that course)

Thursday was pleasant for me for another reason. Owing to a cock up by our civil litigation tutor forgetting to hand out the group exercise to half of the class, only one person (me) had actually prepped (it was due in that day). So the rest of the group asked me if they could submit mine as being the group's work. Naturally I said yes (no point in saying no), and was treated like a king for the rest of the day (well, actually I just slacked off and let them do the group workshop tasks). Good deal, that one!

A similar thing had happened for the last group business exercise. I was asked if mine could be submitted as being by the group-so I agreed and it was redrafted by another team member. We got it given back by the tutor on Friday-covered in pencil marks and alterations. Even for a lot of money, I couldn't say which parts of it were mine (but I'm guessing the most corrected bits)

The weekend has gone pretty quick (don't they always?) but I haven't done as much prep as normal-there's something not quite right. My motivation levels have needed a bit of a kick-whether it's from the tail end of the cold that I've been struggling with for about 3 weeks or just a overalll feeling of 'yeah, so what', it's difficult to put my finger on it.

But, it's not only me. Having had a few chats with my fellow tutees this week there is a general mood of 'nah, dont fancy it, mate'. The consensus appears be that half term is a mistake and it would have been better to have kept going to the Christmas break. I hope that it picks up again next week or else the following week (mocks) are going to hit a few people hard.

Dont worry me though, just so long as I pick up my conduct points!