The Leaving Cert has passed but ‘The Dream’ still lingers on

YOU want to have a heart of stone not to have sympathy for the Leaving Cert class of 2020, the vast majority of them preparing diligently over the past year or so for the so-called ‘biggest exam of their lives’.

In February, everything seemed to be going to plan with the work schedules for the final big run-in to the exams that always seemed to coincide with a spell of good weather, just to compound that feeling of being imprisoned by broad daylight.

Then there was talk of postponement with a new date in July scheduled for the start of the tests and now over recent days the almost inevitable cancellation of the formal exams seems was confirmed. It had reached the point where this year’s Leaving Cert class had to be given some kind of certainty, if only for the sake of their mental health.

From speaking to colleagues who sat the Leaving Cert back in the mid-1970s, I don’t believe that I’m in any way unique, when I confess to getting the occasional flashback of sitting in that isolated desk of an old gym at Tuam CBS, lurking in a world of nervous frenzy, semi-nausea and I suppose real fear as the superintendent placed the exam paper on my desk.

My cause probably wasn’t helped by a distinctly selective approach to study concentration where, in English for example, certain poets would either be ruled in or out of the exam preparation time.

Would it be Keats or Shelley? Kavanagh or Yeats? Milton or Pope? One thing was always pretty much of a certainty in those days, and I’m guessing it’s the same today, is that William Shakespeare would always be confronting you in some shape or form, whether it be Hamlet, Macbeth or Coriolanus or one of his sonnets.

In the seconds after that English paper was left down on your desk, there was always the frantic search for your favourite poet . . . happiness being defined as seeing the name in front of you from whose verses you could pretty much quote ad lib.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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