Surrounded by books in her local library, with a face mask covering her nose and mouth, Farzana Nazari carefully wrote down her English essay analysing the text Go Back To Where You Came From.
Then she re-wrote it, trying to memorise it for her exam on Tuesday.
English is the Afghan refugee's first Higher School Certificate exam on Tuesday and for her, it is the most difficult.
When she started high school four years ago, she did not speak the language.
“I have experienced this problem before. There are some words in the exam that I don't understand, some vocabulary,” she told SBS News.
“That is the thing that makes almost all of my answers wrong.”
Despite her work ethic, studying an average of four hours a day, it has been hard for Farzana to achieve in 2021.
Farzana Nazari studies at Blacktown's Max Webber Library. Source: Lucy Murray
The western Sydney lockdown meant learning from home for the best part of a year, with lessons over the internet making it more difficult with English as a third language. The lack of visual cues made it more difficult to grasp concepts.
“They were sending me work, but there were parts I wouldn't understand,” the 18-year-old said.
“Sometimes they were saying 'if you have any questions you can put them in Google Classroom', but I was embarrassed. What if I put it in and other kids make fun of me?”
“It was using my dictionary to help myself and sometimes I would not understand, I would use [Google] Translate and other platforms.”
On top of this, Farzana has had to contend with the confronting images coming out of her homeland Afghanistan as the Taliban took over the country.
The stress of everything has had an impact on her mental health.
“It made me feel really bad … every day someone is calling, one of our relatives from Afghanistan calling [asking] ‘can one of you do something for us, an invitation, to get us out of here?’ And we wish we could, but it is really hard, almost impossible," she said.
“It was hard because I was really upset and I wasn't able to go outside and see my friends and family. I would say that I am kind of a social person, I am outside most of the time, it was hard for me to just stay home.”
Hundreds of people run alongside a US Air Force plane as it moves down a runway in Kabul, Afghanistan on 16 August. Source: AP
Intensive English Language (IEC) teachers say preparing for exams has been especially difficult for students with English as a second language.
Schools have had to pull back on work to make wellbeing the focus.
“A normal lesson when you do it with a group of friends, it goes quickly. You have support from teachers. [But] doing it independently is a lot more difficult,” said Taahira Taufique, an IEC teacher at Evans High School in Blacktown.
Taahira Taufique is an Intensive English Teacher at Evans High School in Blacktown. Source: Lucy Murray
“Some [students] did reach out and say 'I am stressed I am overwhelmed'. The school reacted by pulling back the workload a little bit.”
Study stress impacting mental health
While not all students face the same challenges, across the board many have reported feeling extremely stressed this year.
A survey of 1,000 students by mental health organisation ReachOut found one in three students feel study stress is having a major impact on their mental health, which is almost twice as many as last year.
“We saw really significant increases in the number of young people who were finding it difficult to focus and having trouble sleeping. As well as many young people recognising from a nutrition perspective they had moved over to the high caffeine and sugar side of things,” said ReachOut CEO Ashley de Silva.
His advice for students is to keep some perspective this exam season.
Ashley de Silva is the CEO of mental health organisation ReachOut. Source: Lucy Murray
“As important as this feels, it will not make or break your whole life,” he said.
“Some really quick things you can do, is make sure you have a routine, stick with the sleep, and just make sure you are taking time out among all these exams to still do things that help you renew.”
As Farzana heads into her exams this week, she is thinking about the women of Afghanistan who’ve had their dreams dashed by the Taliban, and the sacrifices her parents made to bring her here.
“I am trying my best, to be as good as I can, to pay off their hardship a little bit, by making them proud,” she said.
One day she hopes to be a pilot or flight attendant.
