i want the whole world to celebrate

Title, as always, is a lyric taken from SOTD which can be found at the bottom of the post :)

If you're like me and currently waiting for your A-Level (or AS) exam results (next Thursday), or you're waiting for your GCSE results (sometime after next Thursday, I'm guessing?), then you might be finding yourself becoming increasingly irritated at the headlines already.

Last night, I saw a tweet by ITV News saying "new university tuition fees may be deterring students, according to an Independent Commission on Fees study". Aside from stating the absolute obvious, it really irritated me. Every year there's a whole host of headlines that just scare students. This, coupled with the ridiculous series of recent headlines referring to this year's exams such as ''examiners told to fix grades'', is something I always get annoyed about.

I had a huge rant on Tumblr, but to sum it up here's what I think:

• The press needs to shut up about exams both until results day and afterwards too. Yes, it's proven that exams are easier than they 'used to be', but that's because exam boards have let their standards slip and isn't something we need to be discussing on a day when the vast majority of 16/17/18 year olds in England are picking up results that, to them, define their future. Let's just leave them all to celebrate for at least a day before we bring out pieces on statistics and have people that are supposedly knowledgable going ''well, yes, the exams were easy''. My reply to that ridiculous statement is always "well, no, they're not - we still face the same pressures you adults faced, we still experience the same fear when we open our results and we still worked damn hard for our grades despite anything in our personal lives that might have stopped us achieving".
• Us young people also need to shut up too. Whenever exams are going on, anybody who's already done their GCSEs whinges about people doing their GCSEs finding them difficult. The same goes for A2 students about AS students. Yes, fair enough, you're finding your higher level exams tough, but then you also found your GCSEs tough because at the time, it was the toughest situation you'd faced academically. And, contrary to the popular belief held amongst people my age, it's OK for people waiting for GCSE results to be nervous - I'm pretty sure we all were, werent' we? Have a bit of understanding, please. And if you already do, well done, your lack of whiney Facebook statuses about ''GCSE kids'' would definitely be welcome on my Facebook home page around the time of exams.

Anyway, the whole annoyance got me thinking about the fact that we're never really allowed to celebrate our achievements in public (if that makes no sense, hang on, it will in a minute). Even now, you could be hugely proud of something you achieved 5 years ago, but if you told people about it you'd probably be seen as bragging about it. I don't really understand why we have such a negative attitude towards achievement - if a friend or classmate fails their test/exam/whatever, I can almost guarantee that at some point, with one person, their sadness about it has irritated you. Similarly, if somebody does really well in something and talks about it a lot - because they're so happy - I bet a lot of you will have been irritated by that too. And I'm not saying that I'm not guilty of doing it too, because trust me I have. The fact that pretty much all of us do it kind of excuses it, but every now and then I think it's nice to just think about the good things people do.

If you're on Google+, you might know that in the profile section, you can fill out something on your ''bragging rights''. One of the things that I wrote in there is ''technically published author'', because I am. I have a short story that was printed in a book in something like 2008/2009. Quite a few people around my age had their stories published in this book, and 10 of us also had them published in the local paper. If I read it back now, it's terrible, but at the time the fact that it was chosen to both be published in the first place and then also chosen as part of the top 10 was just the most amazing thing to me. It's not the sort of thing you tell someone when you first meet them though, is it? And I bet that most people I met after leaving school won't know about it.

It makes me sad that there's a guarantee that on my results day, and then again on the GCSE results day, the headlines will be somehow negative. It's a day to celebrate - it's a day when you can say ''look, this is what I did even though this, this and this happened''...

...So, is there anything you're particularly proud of? Did you ever get exam results that you weren't expecting that made you happy? Is there something you accomplished that others didn't seem to care about? No matter how big or small the achievement, feel free to share it in the comments and we can all celebrate it with you :)

It's been a while since the last one, but today's SOTD is mainly just because it fits with the post :)

Good luck in advance if you're expecting exam results sometime soon, I hope you all get the grades you're hoping for.

Rx

P.S. I need to say a big thank you to Gabriella and Jane for nominating me for the Liebster award, I'll have my post up tomorrow :)