The end of life as a leaving certificate student

Oh, surely today is a good day. Bit windy, bit it's unfair to judge the day on weather alone. Today, as you may have guessed by the title or have just known, was the day of my last leaving cert exam. As it turned out, it was economics, y'kno.

Two weeks of unmissable, insurmountable, un-get-out-of-able exams, or summer tests as one optimistic student called them, dominated the lives of sixth year students all over this fair isle (and that weird other country that does a form of the Leaving). In sooth, I pity the poor sods that aren't finished yet. For example, the music heads, but it's their own fault for being music heads, nobody forced them to be. But seriously folks, two years doing senior cycle for two weeks of show off knowledge time is all it boils down to. I know that's not aparticularly revolutionary notion, but, eh, the fact o' de matter is dat dere over now, well, for me anyway!

English I, English II, Maths I, Gaeilge I, Gaeilge II, Maths II, French, History, Chemistry and Economics. Seven subjects, ten papers. That's what's expected of us, young ones and young fellas. It's strange to think, most people older than us, present Leavin' students, have sat the same exams. Parents, teachers, shopkeepers, Jacko park warden (well?). But nobody seems to have any good advice on how to keep sane or not to drive yourself loopy. "You'll do fine" doesn't help. There's dozens of those silly little phrases that don't actually mean anything. Clarke's words of wisedom were ok. Now, I don't know the exact words used. But they came to the conclusion that the leaving isn't as big as it's made out to be. And, now that I can take a objective look at it, I'd agree. But, by far the best advice I was even given in the face of exams came from a Swords woman presently living in the state of Italy. Before sitting the Junior Cert she told me to just go in there and puke all over dem bleedin' exam papers!

I tried to stay clear of the media during the whole thing. Of course, with the 'lection and all the hype about the Greens and the crap proformance of the PDs, I couldn't really. Newspapers were ok because you can choose not to read an article. But a mistake I made was listening to Gerry Ryan, for about three minutes on the morning of the fifth. This young one called up and was saying that she was gonna study all day and get up at half six the following morning to look at final things for English. Bitch. What made it worse, was that Gerry, owner of the Ryan-Line, was like, "oh yeah, well that's about right, yeah".....slurp...shite. So, officially that day, I ruled out 2fm for morning radio (apart from the odd Colm&JimJim). Anyway, Ray Darcy is much better. There's no coin flippin' to be done between Ray, the cool former The Den presenter, slick, but small, deadly Darcy and Gerry, with the puke invoking voice, old-timer, low ratings, shite loving, (apparently) Ryan. Sorry Gerry.

I think this will be my concluding paragraph, not that I'm bothered with concluding paragraphs or have ever been bothered with them. The day that began on June sixth has ran its course and the sun has set over the horizon of Exam Centre 3981.