Katherine Whitbourn

Can the school magazine survive the social media age?

From our UK edition

After all these years its pages smell distinctly fusty and its rusting staples are hanging on by a thread. But there is something about flicking through an old school magazine that jolts the past back into the present in a way nothing else quite can. More than four decades on, there they still are: those apparently trivial but meaningful events that punctuated my and my schoolmates’ formative years, faithfully chronicled for all time. The doings of the sixth-form committee that ran weekly tea parties for the elderly are painstakingly recorded. A report of a field trip to Warwick sits alongside details of a junior school production of Antigone. Long-forgotten faces from my girls’ grammar school swim into view as I turn the pages.

The horror of exams

From our UK edition

My heart is pounding, my hands are shaking and there’s a leaden feeling in the pit of my stomach. My pupils are dilated and my digestive process has ground to a halt. My sympathetic nervous system is kicking in and activating its ‘fight or flight’ response. And how do I know all this? Because the subject of ‘Stress, and the Body’s Reaction to It’ is one of the topics on the AQA AS-level psychology syllabus — an exam I’m just about to sit. Stress? I don’t just know about it. I’m living it.