Critical thinking in the Leaving Cert. Whatever will they think of next?

EXAM DIARY: I was forced to take my learned-by-heart answers and upend them to create new ones, writes JESSICA LEAN

BE CAREFUL what you wish for.

“The Leaving Cert doesn’t test your critical thinking skills!” I bleated.

“It’s just a test of memory!” I sneered.

“I want to show what I’ve learned in the last two years, not the last two days!” I implored.

Well they showed me.

English paper 2 was really, really hard.

All the questions were phrased in such a way that I was forced to take my learned-by-heart answers and upend them to create new ones, which I believe is known in the trade as “critical thinking”.

And my attitude of yesterday is known, I understand, as hubris. Don’t say I never apply my learning to the real world.

Anyhow, despite my feelings of humility yesterday, I couldn’t help the tiniest measure of prurience as I rubbernecked distraught clusters of Boland-bankers forming sympathetic scrums in the yard.

Luckily for them, and us, our teachers have been helicoptering around the exam hall ready to offer an encouraging word or a shoulder to cry on.

They’ve all been there, in the unseasonal gloom, hoping to ferry us over the River of Styx that is the Leaving Cert postmortem.

If it was me, I’d have done a Seánie on it by now – golf on the Costa.

No hanging around to pick up the pieces.

Speaking of which – that banking report is really messing with my karma.

Could Messrs Honahan, Regling and Watson not have held on a couple of days? I don’t need to add impotent rage to the spectrum of new emotions these exams are smoking out.

I avoided the news very successfully yesterday but in the car on the way to the exam this morning, I was ambushed by reports of buccaneering by the banks.

Great word though, buccaneering. I made a mental note to squeeze it into yesterday’s paper but the opportunity never arose.

Coronation Street, on the other hand, did escape me. Tony the serial killer’s back! But I couldn’t partake in the Big Hostage Episode because I was being held hostage by William Butler Yeats in a darkened upstairs room.

Last night I readied myself for what will be one of the most difficult days of the Leaving; maths, which I loathe, and geography, with which I have a steady-as-she-goes relationship. By that I mean it’s not a buccaneering relationship (see what I did there?), a likely-to- break- our-heart kind of relationship like I had with English.

The whole maths thing is a bit of a sorry tale too. I don’t need maths for college and I don’t like it so much and therefore I have done the absolute minimum necessary to get through. I know that the day will come when I will regret writing maths off.

I have an uneasy feeling that maths is running the show and that I, with my guitar and poetry books and YouTube videos, am just a colourful piece of lint on a cog in the wheel, not even a functioning part.

It was with heavy heart that I flitted over the maths primer like a pre-bust financial regulator skimming over a bank’s lending books.

Jessica Lean is a student at Christ King Secondary School, Cork.