Why, asked our geography teacher, are apple trees not planted on hillsides? Because, sir, I offered, in an early excess of wit, the apples would roll all the way down to the bottom! For that, I was stood outside the door. But I must have got some things straight by the day of the (UK) Leaving Cert, where an unbelievable 92 per cent in geography earned the one school prize of my life.
I don't think I'd get it today. Geography, already as broad as the "wide earthly world", seems to grow more expansive and urgent with every generation. Third World famine, city growth, climate change, core-and-periphery economics - there's always something more on the horizon. But for geography as it first comes to mind - the physical tapestry of land, water and human settlement - Ireland is simply the best teaching arena imaginable. It has so many striking landforms within everyone's cultural experience, not to mention adventures for the mind in the story of the island's Ice Age. Imagine learning geography in the flat, dry middle of a continent, with two kinds of weather, three kinds of rock, and the sea 1,000 kilometres away.
Physical geography, with its strongly visual facts (who wouldn't be grabbed by plate tectonics, earthquakes and volcanoes?) becomes the anchor of most students' sense of the earth. How odd, then, to find the Burren - Ireland's most exciting, and often controversial landscape - somehow failing to connect. In ordinary-level geography in 1998, the examiners found the Burren seemed to be "lost" on very many of the candidates, with a poor performance from those who did try it. And last year, a 50-mark question on the Burren distressed higher-level candidates no end. "The stone monuments and the plant life of the Burren," it read, "form a rich heritage worthy of preservation. Discuss this statement."
The trouble was that, beyond juggling a few terms like "megalithic tomb" and "Alpine flowers", few students felt equipped to discuss the statement at all.
The increasing overlap between geography and ecology is something that needs thinking about. As traditionally taught, geography has looked at nature very much as a resource for human exploitation: timber, minerals, fisheries and so on, with tourism the latest way of "using" the landscape. Now, the conservation of ecosystems and the intrinsic value of wilderness call for a rather different emphasis. A recent question on overfishing was popular and well answered.
Eventually, perhaps, we shall see James Lovelock's Gaia - the world as a self-regulating living organism - as the central model of geography. That would give even greater point to questions on climate which now, if one teacher is right, get answered mostly by "the bluffers".
Meanwhile, a field trip to the Burren would be a highlight for any geography class, but most teachers brave enough to take a class of teenagers out of doors in one lump try to do their best nearer home. At the nearest secondary school to me, in Louisburgh, Co Mayo, students may find themselves on a windswept Atlantic beach, comparing its present, tourist uses with those of the subsistence-farmer past.
Just as valid, if not perhaps as much fun, might be studying the siting of a new midlands shopping centre, or where to build a bypass around a town.
The exam value of fieldwork depends a lot on how teacher and class get on together, and the numbers of ordinary-level students choosing that question is still modest (37 per cent in 1998). Those that have the confidence seem to do well. Fieldwork is classed, for some reason, as part of economic geography, a section of the 1998 paper that was largely ignored by the candidates, with the agriculture question least popular of all.
THE comparatively new use of 1:50,000 maps, and the promise of aerial photographs that can be read in more than two dimensions, would seem to set the scene this year for more questions about planning new housing and transport to cope with the economic boom. Last year's higher-level paper invited the candidate to think "as a Geographer" in discussing a new bridge across the Shannon. This honour seemed to panic a lot of people, though I can't see why.
How far students should venture on the social and economic questions seems to be very bound up with how alert they are to current events. When exam-setters go out of their way to be topical, the material for answering just isn't in the textbooks. Topics like Third World hunger and poverty often press strong emotional buttons and may seem to offer brownie points for virtuous concern - but you do need some facts to discuss them.
"You have been asked as a Geographer to advise the authorities on how to respond to the refugee issue in Ireland," ran one higher-level question last year. Not a choice for the student who, according to his mother on the Irish Times Exam Countdown web seminar "has never read a newspaper and usually switches the news off". Well, maybe he's brilliant at mapwork and rocks.
With such a wide span of possible questions, revision must be quite a headache: no wonder the exam tips from LeavingCert.Net urge geography students to concentrate on key topics. At the same time, the "current affairs" input invited in the social and economic sections may offer many students fewer good choices than they hoped for. No wonder they get so caught up in planning their options and their time (another five minutes per question this year!)
Things were so much simpler 50 years ago, when one could find time to think about rosy apples rolling down a hill.
