HEALTH PLUS:After students return from the exam, don't ask 'how did you get on?' but 'how are you?'
THE LEAVING Cert begins tomorrow. It is a significant event in students’ educational lives.
This is their year. Their future depends on it, or so it seems. Students are aware that their next occupational or educational choices depend upon the outcome.
The Leaving Cert exam has been discussed at home, in school, at career guidance sessions, when completing CAO forms and in the media where tried and trusted recommendations are given.
Experts in certain academic subjects remind students about reading the questions, allocating sufficient time to each question, the format of papers, templates for answers with advice on what constitutes an adequate, a good or an excellent paper.
Others counsel in relation to exam stress, how to harness adrenalin in the service of study and what to do if motivation has gone or if anxiety is incapacitating.
Among classmates there is usually heightened group contact in the weeks before the exam as students monitor each other’s study progress and psychological disposition for reference and reassurance.
This is an emotional time. Students who have been together, many since early childhood, are about to embark together on one last venture after which they may go different ways. It is the end of an era for them.
Comrades in adversity, they also share the excitement, the concerns, the moments of confidence and the depths of panic that anticipation of the exam can evoke. They understand each other in ways that others cannot understand them. They understand each other because they are the same age going through the Leaving Cert exam for the first time.
There is commonality of life-stage, generation, emotion and purpose that unites them.
Yet, despite the camaraderie, it is important, perhaps, to recognise that each student is also essentially alone. In an existential way, students must encounter this academic rite of passage, this educational transition and this progression into adulthood on their own, with all the accompanying unarticulated emotions it can contain. That is why they need so much support now and in the coming weeks.
Parents too, however academically savvy or psychologically pragmatic they may be, also cannot escape some moments of remembering their child’s first day at school, his or her first step on this educational journey; the culmination and evaluation of which is about to begin tomorrow. It can feel like the end of an era for parents.
While parents may savour memories of their students childhood and the long road leading to tomorrow, this is not the time, as parents themselves know, to share these reflections with their examinees.
It is not the time to talk about the end of childhood, the completion of secondary school, how the years have flown or how crucial tomorrow is.
It is a time for absolute pragmatics, making sure that everything for tomorrow is ready: the school bag, the revision notes, all exam accoutrements, tissues, money for transport and for lunch.
It is good to ensure that the mobile is powered and whatever drinks and sweets are allowed in the exam hall are bought; that a packed lunch, if they are having one, is prepared and that a number of ways of waking in the morning are organised instead of reliance on one alarm.
Parental wisdom and psychological research suggest that the most useful communication with students tomorrow avoids false reassurances such as “you’ll be fine” if a student expresses anxiety.
Instead it helps if parents acknowledge that anxiety is normal on the first exam day and usually subsides as the day goes on.
Additionally, when wishing students good luck it has been found useful if parents express a hope that they “get a chance to do justice” to what they know.
This conveys the message that good students can have an off day. This may sound pessimistic but it is oddly reassuring. It shows realism. It takes pressure off because it provides a rationalisation if a paper is difficult or mismanaged.
And every parent knows that tomorrow when students return home to a warm welcome and some favourite foods, they are not asked, “how did you get on?” but “how are you?”.
May they get the chance to show their academic worth, but if they don’t, let us know their worth anyway and let them know how valuable they are.
Clinical psychologist Marie Murray is the director of the Student Counselling Services at UCD and author of
Surviving The Leaving Cert: Points for Parents
(Veritas)