Disaster

On Wednesday this week I had my very last NCEA exam - Chinese. This was supposed to be my easiest exam of the seven, but I wasn't going to take any chances, as usually I stuff things up! I spent all morning practising characters, grammar structures and listening to Chinese tapes right up till 1.30pm. Reporting time was supposed to be 1.40pm! So we rushed over to school where I met up with the rest of the Chinese class.

We didn't go into the room till about 5 minutes before the exam since there were so few of us. We sat our exam in the accounting room. We started off with the listening section, where we had to listen to passages read in Chinese on tape. It wasn't too bad at first. Listening is my worst paper in Chinese, so I usually have to concentrate very very hard whenever I listen to the tape! It was just a little unfortunate Nikki, who was a little sick, got into a bit of a coughing frenzy. I heard her plead to the supervisor to stop the tape, but to no avail. The tape kept playing. I ended up missing bits of the passage but just tried to make notes. I thought I'd just fill in the answers later on after I had completed the other two papers.

I rushed through the reading section and completed it, and then got to the writing paper. I spent a bit too much time deciding which topic to write on, either careers or sports/leisure. I was at first going to write about careers, but then after a few minutes I decided to go with the other. I wasted too much time planning and thinking about what I was going to write, that I had to rush through writing the whole thing. I ended up with 5 minutes remaining, realising I hadn't filled in the answers to the listening section! I quickly went back to that paper, but time ran out.

The Chinese exam in the end turned out to be a complete disaster. I've never done worse than excellence in any NCEA Chinese paper, and now I'm likely to get a not achieved in one or more of the papers! What I'm more worried about is that I did bad enough not just in Chinese but in all of my exams overall to not make it in the top 20% of NCEA Level 3 students in NZ, and lose my scholarship! I have a few weeks to worry about that now!

I got home that afternoon, feeling pretty bad, but fortunately my good friend was online so I just went on a chatting binge with her, which made me feel a lot better! We then got a phone call from the neighbour, and there was mention of heaps of people standing outside beside the road, and something about a fire. My family and I went outside to check it out, and to our surprise smoke was everywhere! There were also two firetrucks with a third coming up the road. The house on the other side of the road was on fire! The smoke was pouring out the bedroom, and all the neighbours could do was watch from the side of the road. A fire car (as I like to call it!) was parked right across the road blocking it off, while the firefighters did their job. The Pacific Island family who lived at their house were gathered together, with the little boy of the family looking pretty upset and crying. After a while it seemed as though the fire was put out, and the bedroom where the fire originated was all black. Fortunately no one was hurt or injured!