The Leaving Cert – a nightmare that just keeps on giving

Even those who sleep the sleep of the innocent always have one recurring nightmare – it invariably involves a question you’d never anticipated coming up in the Leaving Cert.

And if there’s a week in the year when that doomsday scenario unfolds to upset your slumber, then it’s currently galloping over the horizon like a posse on the trail of a gang of cattle rustlers.

Because this is Leaving Cert season – the one time of the year that weather forecasters can take their holidays, secure in the knowledge that the sun will be splitting the rocks, as the condemned make their way into the study hall with all of the anticipation and bravado of a turkey two weeks before Christmas.

For the rest of us who walked that same walk sometime well back in the last century, the butterflies grow no less intense – all the moreso if one of your own is now going down the state exams route.

Are you sorted for the theorems? What formulas are tipped this year? Will the poet be Plath, Bishop, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Hopkins or Derek Mahon?

You’ll never have nightmares about College exams or job interviews, because you’ll never be as stressed about any of those things as you will be on the morning of English Paper 1 (Honours or Ordinary Level) next Wednesday morning at 9.30am.

And it’s no consolation that it’s full to the brim of stuff that you’ll never again need for the rest of your life.

I mean, can you imagine a group of oul’ fellas ruminating over their pints, discussing just how Shakespeare’s sonnets provide a fascinating insight into his views on love, death and morality?

And would your life be any less complete if you didn’t know that, if three parallel lines cut off equal segments on some transversal, then they will cut off equal segments on any other transversal?

But that’s the bread and butter of the Leaving Cert – ridiculous questions and absurd formulas about things that are utterly irrelevant to real life because they couldn’t think of anything practical to ask you about.

And in turn – to beat the system – the teachers have spent years coming up with stock answers for these great imponderables…answers to be learned off in advance of the exam, retained for all of three hours and then dumped into the darkest recesses of your maturing mind.

Take this nugget from one helpful student as to how you deal with the ‘poetry question’ – and in fairness this at least offers some nod towards learning.

“Learn an intro and conclusion for each poet and tweak it to the question. Then do about a paragraph or two on each poem and then add a paragraph relating to the question. That’s it really; that’s how I do all my poetry essays.”

Such gems are all over the internet; you can get your hands on full sets of notes – so many that you probably wouldn’t need to go to school at all if you had fibre-optic broadband – or you could trouser up the thousands for cram schools which specialise in showing the short-cut to examination success.

Part of this is down to the fact that students are now locked into this world of academia for longer than ever before. And it has evolved in a manner that suggests it was more by default than design.

In our parents’ time, the Group Cert was the height of most families’ ambition – indeed many didn’t make it past primary school.

But then it because the Inter Cert and gradually – in our time – it was the Leaving. But now a degree is the new Leaving Cert, a Masters is the new degree and a PhD isn’t as farfetched as it was in the good old days.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.