Jackie Chan and a Lioness - My Eleven Plus Interview Experience
Jackie Chan and a Lioness - My Eleven Plus Interview Experience
“Jackie Chan!” I sat content with myself, grinning with innocent pride. A stunned silence momentarily ensued before the teachers started giggling; my parents later joined in with nervous laughter. They wondered whether my idiosyncratic answer being assessed or whether their reaction to it was.
It’s been thirteen years since my 11+ interviews took place. Although I had a few, I want to focus on one in particular during this article; the school will remain unnamed. It seems whilst I can’t remember what I did last week, I still remember this interview well.
The stress of sitting 11+ exams was itself overbearing; to make matters worse I had been told I needed to sit an interview. I turned up deeply unprepared; my parents had invested huge amounts of time into my exam preparation, but very little into my interview. In fairness to them, it was very difficult for them to realise quite how important the interview was.
I find it ironic, looking back, that every waking second of the middle of my childhood had been spent doing bond papers, practise tests and revision reading. Yet very little time had been spent preparing for the interview. My primary school had done a brief practice session with me, but it was nothing like the real interview; the setting, types of questions and the format were completely different.
I, like most students, was woefully unprepared. Yet, for all intents and purposes, the interview was just as important as the exam itself.
This may explain my parents inner panic at hearing my answer to the interviewer’s first question; “Who inspires you?” After a few moments pause, and scrolling through my heroes in my head, I came up with what I believed to be a full proof answer; “Jackie Chan!”
At this point my parents entered internal meltdown; had they spent so long and so much money on teaching resources for me to throw away my chances of getting into secondary school at this point? Why hadn’t they made sure I had an answer to that question? Why was their child so obsessed with Jackie Chan?
Lesson 1: Prepare
Thankfully the interviewers saw what they thought was the funny side, having had other candidates suggest icons such as “Gandhi”, “Winston Churchill” and “The Pope”. Ironically, I was deadly serious and when given a chance to change my answer, I stuck with my guns.
At first this confused the interviewers; wasn’t I getting the hint? The answer here was no. However, fortunately, it came to impress them when I offered up a well structured and compelling argument:
Premise 1: He’s a successful businessman and philanthropist
Premise 2: He’s helped reduce cultural tensions between the US and China
Premise 3: He’s super awesome
Conclusion: Jackie Chan inspires me
Lesson 2: Know how to structure an argument
Luckily, years of arguing with almost everyone had prepared me for this moment. Yet, the number of students I come across who have no idea how to structure an argument shocks me. It should be taught at the very beginning of education; yet I was taught this way of fundamentally understanding the world at the very end of my A Levels.
Being able to construct an argument helps examine the world critically, build academic essays, allows one to present their opinion amongst many other things. Importantly, in this scenario, it is what interviewers look for. It shows a student knows how to think.
After batting off the interviewers, and calming my parents nerves slightly, the interviewers went in for round two: “You wrote quite an emotive story about a lioness in your creative writing exam; if we remember correctly, she was killed whilst protecting her cubs in a forest where humans were attempting to burn down trees to clear way for industry. It was rather morbid; far sadder than stories written by your peers. Why did you do this?”
Lesson 3: Have confidence
Interviewers will try to break you. Not in a malevolent way; they don’t enjoy children crying. But they do enjoy intellectually stretching them. One classic way to do this is to make the candidate think they’ve made a mistake, when they haven’t, and see if they are willing to defend themselves. This takes confidence.
I was never a particularly confident child myself; especially in an interview environment.
Without trying to blow our own horn too much, the most effective way I’ve seen to build confidence in an interview environment, having worked with lots of children on this, is practise.
Not practise questions. Practice interviews; in specific with people they don’t know and in an unfamiliar environment.
The last two factors I’ve mentioned make the world of difference to children. It is a completely different ball game to them when compared to practising questions with their parents or family.
They need to practise with people they don’t know and in an unfamiliar environment to be confident with people they don’t know and in an unfamiliar environment. This should be simple, and yet it seems so often forgotten.
I hadn’t had a chance to experience either of these, so I didn’t have confidence. I gave a rather limp answer along the lines of “I like sad things”, but it eventually the interviewers had to tell me that they were testing me and that my essay was rather good; in fact it was the best in the year. Curiously, despite its strength, I was unwilling to defend it.
Had I had confidence I would have defended my essay and my parents would been sweating far less in the corner of the room. Yet my lack of confidence betrayed me at this crucial moment.
I didn’t end up going to the school in any case, and went to another rather good school, but the lessons I learnt in that interview stuck with me. They helped me through my subsequent university and job interviews, and now I teach them to others. This includes some wide eyed and young eleven plus students who sometimes rather remind myself of me.
Lesson 4: Don’t use Jackie Chan in an interview, unless you wish to torture your parents
Author: Kes - Oxford
BA Philosophy, Politics & Economics
In my mentoring, I like to focus on building critical thinking and communication skills, which are fundamental to both PPE. In my experience, the best way to build these skills is through understanding argument structure and then applying it to different scenarios.
