Those dreaded finals

By Kerri Havnen Gordon,

Long ago when we were teenagers, before the adult stresses of Christmas, before the last-minute shopping, endless baking, holiday cards and mad dash to buy a fresh string of Christmas lights, came the training ground for all future Decembers – final exams.

Christmas and finals. Both inspire dread. Both involve procrastination, then cramming, and a sense that at this rate we’ll never be ready. There is always more to do – more holiday preparations for us and for the students in our midst, more studying.

I’ve been out of college for more years than I care to admit, and I still occasionally have “final exam dreams.” The specifics vary, but the common theme is that I am woefully unprepared. Sometimes I walk into the final and am horrified to realize that I haven’t been to one lecture the entire quarter. Or I’m in the wrong room. Or I show up on the wrong day, which means I will flunk.

Or I wander helplessly around campus, unable to find the classroom even though I had faithfully attended each class. But the worst are the dreams in which I rush into the final exam room about five minutes late, and everyone’s jaws drop because I am buck naked, which of course I didn’t realize until just then.

Can’t get much more unprepared than that. Why is it that these dreams persist for decades after we have stopped being students? A friend said that she had recently dreamed the one where she’d forgotten to go to class all semester and couldn’t answer a single question on the exam. She woke up all panicky and sweaty.

“You’d think I’d be over it by now!” she said. After all, she’d been out of school for 25 years.

There is something about that quintessential experience of knowing you’re about to be tested, wondering if you’ll be ready, afraid you’re going to blow it, hoping you’ll have enough time to prepare, scared that you won’t. This is true for final exams, Christmas and just about every other thing in life that involves a hard and fast deadline.

No wonder we still have nightmares about those old final exams.

My high school sophomore son told me about an online Facebook group called FINALS, which is an acronym for “Fudge, I Never Actually Learned this Stuff.” Well, I’m paraphrasing here because this is a family newspaper, but guess what?

At this writing the FINALS Facebook group has 152,485 members from colleges and high schools all over the country – 152,485! And I’ll bet every one of them is dreading at least one exam in the near future.

While all those students are staring down finals, I’m staring down Christmas. Will we all be ready? Who knows, but it’s a ready or not sort of thing. Students will walk into their exams armed with their No. 2 pencils and whatever knowledge they’ve managed to glean, and I’ll wake up on Christmas morning having done as much as I’m going to do. And we’ll all hope that in the end we’ll feel good about it.

I was surprised when some teenage boys in my car recently said they have already had dreams about final exams. They are only 15 years old. Hate to break it to you, boys, but you know those dreaded finals that fry your nerves on exam day? Well, they will come back to haunt you in the night. For decades. But at least there won’t be a test to take in the morning.