Domesticated wilderness

Name 5 wild animals and 5 domestic animals is the default question that I remember from in my preschool entrance exam time which has survived into the second millennium. S.Ve Sekar comedies of "Anju singam Anju Naai" apart, it was from an era when I know answers for questions only at end of the chapter and anything else in exam was considered as incorrect question. The end of chapter questions would be segregated into two sections - one set straight forward questions for which I would put open bracket and close bracket on matching sentences from the lesson as answer and dabba adichify and second set would be those questions which begin with "discuss" and "justify" which were usually omitted. I remember asking this to my teacher in one of the exams that she had "incorrectly" included a "justify" question on the paper. She was perplexed as to what was wrong with the question and sushed me saying everything was correct. I again asked her the meaning for "justify" as till that time I was under the impression that those questions can be ignored and didn't even knew what the word meant. She tried her best to give an answer but the look on her face told me my mark for that paper.

It was standard practice in my previous school that questions would be from the end of lesson list, especially for language subjects. The fact that lessons were called as "chapters" itself was kind of off-putting when I switched school. Even more odd was teachers being called as "madam" which the "D" section kids shortened to "Mam". We "C" section kids used to mock them for bleating like goats but were shepherded into the terminology anyway. Even though it took a while, i finally got accustomed to questions which are on the topic and even stopped looking at the chapter end questions. Come the board exams, by which time I had again switched school, it was a throw back to question bank mode. Every one of us scrounged for previous several decades of question papers. I took it as a hobby to collect the question papers and probably would've scored more had the hobby also included searching for answers as well.

One good thing in college was that it was a bit of both. While the first two years year end exams were major repeats from previous 5 years of questions, I had fallen in love with Maths by that time to even bother. I devoured question bank across colleges and had adrenaline rush every time I would tick all those questions that were completed. Probably the only phase in my entire academic period where I liked to study rather than being forced to. Few days back my friend had shared photos of all those study materials from our college days that he still maintains in mint condition. Fact that we had scribbled answers all over those papers and by mint I meant as-is-where-is as of those days. Honestly I couldn't recollect a single thing from those papers and wasn't even sure if it was a prank to pull my leg. People do say that If​ you understand something you can never forget. I was pretty sure I understood all those differential equations, Laplace transformations, Fourier series, inter/extrapolations, Runge-Kutta theorems,  during my student days. Probably way too much junk information has eaten up on those wonderful memories. But one thing that refuses to simmer down is the pronunciation of Euler. Is it "Oyler" or "Yuler" would be a question for the ages.