Best weapon now is a cool head

My Leaving Cert: Mary Hanafin, Minister for Education.

My first experience of the Leaving Cert was in the mid-70s, as a sixth-year boarder in the Presentation secondary school in Thurles. Since then I've been through it many times, as a teacher and now as a minister.

I was a boarder in sixth year and the tension ran pretty high when all those exam-fevered students were put together in one place. It was my birthday during exam week and my parents sent over a huge cream cake, which was enough to feed every Leaving and Inter Cert student. That lifted our spirits.

We had very structured days and nights at boarding school in the weeks and months leading up the exams but the teachers made sure we played plenty of basketball and got plenty of rest.

We worked hard, though. Some of the courses were very wide back then. We had a total of five novels to read for Irish and the history course was endless.

My first paper went really well. It was the International Year of Women that year and I had prepared essay topics on women in art, women in politics, women in history - you name it. Had there been no essay question relating to women I would have been in trouble - but there was and it got me off to a flying start.

The papers rattled along nicely until the day of the French. I fully expected a particular topic to come up and had prepared exhaustively. So had all my classmates. When I turned the paper over, I forgot myself completely and turned to my cousin sitting behind me and said audibly: "Where is it?" Fortunately, I was not ejected from the exam hall.

By the end of the second week, most of the students had finished their exams and had headed home for the summer. I, along with a handful of others, had to hang around for a week for my physics exam. I had planned to get a lot of the physics course covered in that week, but I was too spent from the previous fortnight. That was not the best paper of the lot.

Nonetheless, I got what I wanted and the following year I was learning to be a teacher in Maynooth. I wondered about whether to take Celtic studies or Irish history as part of my course and my English teacher, Sister Alice, told me I'd need Irish history when I went into politics. I don't know how she knew.

Since those days, I have repeated the Leaving Cert many times. When you are a teacher you feel like you're doing the exam with the students. You try to give them the best steer, especially in broad subjects like history, and your heart is in your mouth on the day of the exam as you wait to see if Hitler or Stalin surface this time.

When the results come out, it's as intense a feeling for the teacher as the student. It's great to see students get really high grades. It's even more exciting to see anxious students do better than they thought they would.

Now that I'm the Minister for Education, I have a different kind of exam stress. I worry that a bunch of papers will fall off the back of a truck on the way to an exam hall. If anything goes wrong in the next few weeks, I'll be blamed.

The best advice I can give students at this stage is to have confidence. You've done as much work as you can do and the best weapon you have now is a cool head. With a cool head you are more likely to read the papers properly, answer the questions you are asked (and not the ones you wish you were asked) and recall all that learning that's in your head just waiting to get out.