Exam Fever is Here Again

And it shows, because if you were walking through campus, you'd think everyone had been quarantined and were now lying at home, recuperating.

Well, in a sense, i suppose they are recuperating. Welcome to Exam Fever Season. Bane of both teachers and students alike.

Me, in my program, I'm lucky. I had one exam, on Teaching English on Monday, and I'm cleared for the rest of the semester. Others, including the rest of NTU, I know, have it till almost the end of November.

I would gloat, but I know it'll all come back to me in karmic payments, probably in the first time I have to help mark exam papers. *sweat*

But then again, the Exam Season does give rise to some strange behaviour on the parts of some people. It's probably the overall atmosphere of stress and pressure that does it, and me being in a more relaxed mood now, have the leisure of observing these specimens at will.

One interesting foreign specimen started nesting at the staircase on the same floor as my hostel room. I don't know why she doesn't just stay in her room, but she apparently decided that the staircase was a more conducive place for her to study. The first time I saw her, I nearly got shocked into falling down the staircase. This was because I was walking up the stairs, looking down, when then a pair of feet came into view.

I looked up and I saw this pale, haggard face staring at me, wild, dank strands of hair streaked across her face, with piles of paper in her hand, and muttering some weird language under her breath. In the next few microseconds, I realised that 1. she was human, and 2. she was studying sitting on the staircase and 3. She wasn't a ghost. Thankfully, due to the astonishingly fast neural impulses of the human brain, I registered 1, 2, and 3 in time to not scream bloody murder in her face.

Since then, she's been there almost daily, and sometimes I even see her taking her lunch there. Her spot has been reserved for her, with a few sheets of paper placed there. Just tonight, she was lugging a chair up to her spot. I take it she intends to stay there for quite a while. Maybe next, I'll see her huddled in blankets and sleeping there.

Indeed, Exam Fever does bring out the strangest in some people...... Anyone know any other cases? :p