Teen life: Exam season is a testing time for Facebookers

Exams are looming up and tensions between children and their teachers is running high.

Now that GCSE exams are just two weeks away, everyone in our year group has taken to walking around with an expression of profound dejection on their faces. Usually sunny teachers have grown unnerving, with their dispositions now sunnier than ever. They seem to rejoice in the knowledge that a hundred or so Year 10 pupils who have spent the whole year making their lives utterly miserable will now be getting a taste of their own medicine.

I know the teachers are happy to be getting their own back, but I object to their enjoying watching others suffer, however great the parties' mutual dislike. They are role models for us impressionable minds, after all. With exams around the corner have arisen novel revision techniques. People come to school and spend the whole day fretting about how little time they have to study at home, seeing that school takes about three-quarters of the day and "it's not like we do any proper revision in school, we just listen to teachers lecturing us on the importance of good revision". Then they go home and spend the whole evening airing their concerns about how little time they have to study on Facebook. Our virtual walls are littered with comments like "Frnch exam tmrw!! I hvnt rvsed AT ALL im gng 2 fail!!!! ))=". I find it surprising that these comment-posters have made it all the way to GCSE level and cannot comprehend that if they spent a little less time on Facebook whingeing about failing and a little more time poring over French verb tables, they might not fail at all.

Facebook does have its uses, though. The more ingenious among us have figured out that since we possess a complete inability to bear to be separated from our beloved networking site for as little as a day, we are using it instead to do what our pupil co-ordinator would call Smart Revision. Students of Spanish are also holding long conversations on Facebook, but they are doing it in Spanish. I don't pretend to understand Spanish, but the only drawback is that everything seems abbreviated. And if that's how they are used to spelling Spanish words, the examiners will probably not be impressed.

Apart from being entirely unnecessary and a cruel but effective way of wreaking havoc in the lives of teenagers, GCSEs have also caused our classroom to become unbearably smelly. The sudden revelation that perhaps all those missing revision notes may be lurking in the murky depths of our lockers - which everyone only used in the first few months of the year - has dawned upon us. Students are in a locker-clearing frenzy. They wrench open the doors only to be welcomed by the delectable aroma of old gym socks and apple cores that ended up in the lockers because the dustbin was being serviced.

To add to the mix, my guitar practical exam (not a school exam) is bang in the middle of my maths and science exams, so a pleasant week I shall be having. Pieces of paper are also being distributed that announce in bold: "Plagiarism is a form of cheating. A form of cheating will not be tolerated. Plagiarism is a serious crime. Serious crimes will not be tolerated." Or something along those lines. We have been warned against the dangers of plagiarism by at least seven different teachers now. "Whatever you do, don't regurgitate sections from the text book without giving credit to the author," is the mantra every member of staff feels the need to repeat about 15 times.

"If you mention the word 'apple', you have to write 'Newton'," a certain person intoned, looking around hawk-eyedly. "Or you end up in jail. You cannot copy someone's ideas." And what is it with the rest of the world? Just when you thought that GCSEs couldn't get any worse, along comes a whole host of other events that you would much rather be doing. I have been happily informed that someone younger has got into the musical Fame, now in Dubai, and why don't I try out for another musical, Hairspray? Also, do I want to come and see Robin Hood with that someone? Grr.

Then again, you only ever appreciate musicals or movies about merry men wearing hippie clothes when you've got to concentrate on GCSEs instead. Lavanya Malhotra is a 14-year-old student in Dubai.