Tests kick off, and 'cruel' poetry catches students offside

Leaving Certificate/English: The Leaving Cert English papers were a bit like the German defence - stubborn, hard to break down and not brimming with generosity. Few students or teachers described them as easy and most used adjectives like "tough", "challenging" and "unpredictable".

However, it is no wonder the questions were unpredictable, because this is only the second year of the new English syllabus.

The higher-level students were seriously miffed about the choice of poets, with many caught out when Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney failed to appear.

The first higher-level paper kicked off the exam season and students found it a relatively difficult introduction to the fortnight ahead of them.

There was a strong US theme to the paper, with American writers John Steinbeck and Carl Sandburg taking centre stage. The mixture of 11 separate images plus a piece by Sandburg for text 1 disconcerted several students, said teachers.

Section 2 - the essay section - met with a mixed response. Skoool.ie English expert Anne Gormley said "the type of genre was predictable", but said some students found the topics difficult and challenging.

Paul Slattery, a repeat student from the Tuam Vocational School, Co Galway, found the paper much more difficult than last year. The essay topics, in particular, were very hard, he said. He was also thrown by the fact that there were only three texts in Section 1, as opposed to four last year.

Tommy Glynn, TUI subject representative and a teacher in Inverin, Co Galway, said there was a good choice in the essay questions, but some of the themes were a "little obscure".

Joseph Byrne of the ASTI, who teaches at St Joseph of Cluny, Killiney, Co Dublin, said Paper 2 in the afternoon was tough, but fair. The Hamlet question was fairly predictable, he said.

Sheila Parsons, English teacher at Skerries Community College in north county Dublin, said the poetry question on the euro was a little bit boring and dull. "It was playing to a historical context and would not have been my choice," she said.

The prescribed poetry was "cruel" for a lot of students, with Elizabeth Bishop and Michael Longley coming up for the second year in a row. Some students hoped Seamus Heaney and Emily Dickinson would come up and many were caught offside, she said. Happily, her own students managed to steer a clever course.

The first ordinary-level paper was described in far more glowing terms. Glynn said it was a very attractive paper in terms of the visuals and illustrations used, and a piece on athletics hit a topical note.

Gormley said the compositions were straightforward and easy to write, with topics ranging from a speech to classmates about change in the world to writing about a time in your life when you were under pressure. Like an exam maybe? Students said it was a very fair paper and were happy with it, according to Gormley.

The second ordinary-level paper was very student-friendly, said Byrne, with plenty of variety and lots of smaller questions. Even where there were hard questions, students were offered easier options as well, he said.

Parsons said text 3 was too "conceptual" and would be more suited to the higher-level paper. However, she said the paper was very well laid-out and upbeat.

She said that in section 2(b), the social-setting question was badly framed and vague. It asked about the personalities of various people - whether they were cruel, helpful, narrow-minded or interesting. While it was vague, she said, it was also restrictive and seemed to force students into writing within a very narrow context.

However, her overall view of the Leaving Certificate papers was "upbeat", compared to the Junior Certificate, which she thought was very downbeat and uninspiring.