A Different View with Dave O’Connell
It was picking up the ton-weight school bag that brought it home to me – how could anyone ever manage to get all of those words and diagrams into the average-sized, distracted teenage brain?
Armies have gone to war with lighter kit bags; families have gone on holidays with less to weigh them down – if Ryanair did schoolbags, Michael O’Leary would have doubled his enormous wealth at the check-in desk.
You could put your back out just lifting them, never mind learning them almost off by heart so that you can regurgitate the words over the most tense three hour examination of your life.
And yet, the essence of the Leaving Cert – and Junior Cert – as they began this week is to get all of that info from the page into the head and be able to recite it back at some stage over the next two to three weeks.
I’m reminded of that great line from Oliver Goldsmith in his poem, the Village Schoolmaster.
And still they gaz’d and still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew.
Because it’s nothing short of remarkable to attain a level of knowledge that allows you to even sit examinations in six or seven subjects to this standard, never mind to be so proficient as to aspire to something as rarefied as an ‘A’.
It goes without saying – and not for the first or last time – that the Leaving Cert is the toughest test you will ever face in an exam situation.
The notion of pouring your entire 13 or 14 years of education to date into one three-hour examination is cruel and harsh, and it can still be the stuff of nightmares long after the results make no difference at all to your daily life.
Because it only takes one mistake, a misreading of a question, a migraine, a flat tyre – any of these can conspire to throw you off your stride no matter how hard you’ve studied in the run-up to this great test.
And yet it’s hard to see a fairer way – everyone sits the same paper, everyone is externally and independently assessed and everyone has a state standard certificate with which they enter the next phase of life.
Yes, there should be more emphasis on research than learning off by rote, more weight given to extra-curricular accomplishments – from sport to drama to debating, to involvement in the community – but we are where we are.
This time of year can bring those memories of exam days come flooding back – but this time we have a Leaving and a Junior Cert in our house.
And if you thought it would help, you’d take the bullet yourself – go in and sit the examination for them to spare them the trauma and the angst and the pressure.
But in fairness to them, that wouldn’t help at all because they would like their exam results to show up with something more than D’s or E’s at best.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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