On the English Leaving Certificate fuss of 2009
On Wednesday 3rd June 2009, as candidates across Ireland sat down to take their English Paper 1 (Language), a Leaving Certificate superintendent in County Louth opened in error a package containing Paper 2 (Literature) and distributed it to the students in that centre. In the words of the Irish Times,
The mistake was realised by the superintendent and the correct paper handed out within minutes. But news of the contents of paper 2 spread like wildfire after students emerged from the exam shortly after noon. News of the leak featured on the boards.ie website as early as 2.45pm. News of the leak was also communicated around the country by text message and e-mail.
The paper could not be taken on the Thursday or Friday, since those slots were already taken up by other subjects, so Paper 2 was scheduled for the morning of Saturday 6th June. There was a media firestorm (imagine 14 years later how much worse it would be now), and the evening before the rescheduled exam many of our candidates chose to sit together in the school library to study for it. I wrote this piece while with them, there to advise and soothe nerves; it was published first on the Poetry Ireland blog, and then in Teaching English magazine (from the forerunner of INOTE).
Friday 5th June 2009
I’m sitting in a school library on the evening of Friday 5th June. It’s a beautiful space, its architecture designed to be both functional and pleasing, and since we have the gift of an early summer spell, the golden light is still slanting in from the garden at 8.30pm. I’m surrounded by wooden bookshelves, which house a fine collection of fiction, drama and poetry, the best literature written in English since Anglo-Saxon times. It’s all the very picture of peacefulness.
I’m here to supervise 35 teenagers who have chosen to study in this building on the eve of their Leaving Certificate English Literature exam, mainly to answer questions and help soothe any nerves, but the questions are occasional and mostly just technical, ones that can be answered in two or three sentences. These 18 year-olds seem calmly focussed on their work, and on the rescheduled examination tomorrow morning which has dominated the Irish media over the last two days.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Young people are pretty resilient, and whatever the more hysterical voices in the media have been saying in the last 48 hours, this change of schedule isn’t the most disturbing thing that could have happened to them. After all, such disruption is what most of them will face weekly when they start working; it’s the stuff of adult life. Many have already faced much bigger challenges during their Leaving Certificate years – sports finals, family trouble, bereavements. And it seems disproportionate to the point of being distasteful that all this fuss over the psyches of young people, with talk of helplines and counselling services, should come just two weeks after the Ryan Commission reported on the darkest stain in the history of our education system, and probably of the State itself. A visiting American friend comments on how extraordinary it is that for two days the main items on national radio and television news, and in our newspapers, should have been frenzied discussions of themes in Macbeth, and poets who most adults haven’t heard of – Adrienne Rich, Derek Walcott, Elizabeth Bishop.
That English Literature should be at the centre of this firestorm is paradoxical. The biggest fuss of all has been on which poets are or are not ‘coming up’. But poetry is a shy beast you wouldn’t expect to see out and about on the front pages and the bulletin boards and the social networking sites. All the works of literature those thousands of teenagers have been exploring and studying for two years are beautiful artefacts created by highly imaginative minds, worked on and honed to their perfection over time. Their rightful arena is what Keats in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ called silence and slow time. Take Bishop’s heart-breaking ‘Sestina’, which compresses grief and loneliness in an extraordinary structure. Or John Montague’s pair of poems about his mother and father, ‘The Locket’ and ‘The Cage’, so full of honesty and understanding. Or the glory of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’, poised between mellowness and decadence, as gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
The Irish Times today, in its two full pages headlined ‘Leaving Cert Exam Leak’, also mentions twittering, but this time it’s an explanation of its very recent re-incarnation with a capital T. That’s how language inevitably turns and develops, and this is the flow of language we all move in now, sweeping over us via television, radio, texting, Facebook, moving locust-like from topic to topic.
Every now and then pupils ask me “What’s the point of studying poetry?” (to be fair, they ask that question of almost everything). My answer, partly to wind them up and stimulate an argument, is that poetry is by far the most important subject you can study in school, because : a) the defining characteristic of human beings is language, and therefore b) it is the most important tool each of us has, and therefore: c) we need to understand and use this tool to its maximum effect, and: d) poetry is the most intense and carefully written form of language, and therefore: e) the study of poetry is the most important and practical activity we can possibly undertake. As Steven Pinker writes in The Language Instinct,
Language is so tightly woven into human experience that it is scarcely possible to imagine life without it.
And the official syllabus of this course, published 10 years ago, comments:
Each person lives in the midst of language. Language is fundamental to learning, communication, personal and cultural identity, and relationships. This syllabus aims at initiating students into enriching experiences with language so that they become more adept and thoughtful users of it and more critically aware of its power and significance in their lives.
Right now, it looks like there’s no more important skill than critical awareness of language.
This cohort of Higher Level Leaving Cert candidates has all studied a vivid enactment of that importance. The central character of their core Shakespeare text is a man who starts by using language in brilliant colour and density: Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red. Is there any speech more clear-sighted than Macbeth’s when he considers doing the most terrible thing he could do? He sees everything clearly and articulates this with absolute precision : If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well / It were done quickly. And then through the course of the play we watch his moral decline, and the simultaneous and inter-twined loss of his poetic brilliance. He stops thinking clearly, his actions spiral out of control, and just before he is killed he says And be these juggling fiends no more believed, / That palter with us in a double sense. A man who used language so vividly has ended up trusting a few unconvincing chants.
Our pupils also know well another study of how language can catch fire and cause not just hysteria but even terror: Miller’s The Crucible has been one of their comparative texts, a story of how mere accusation can become ‘truth’. Reverend Hale appears loaded down with half a dozen heavy books and says that there are weighted with authority, but Hale learns that blind acceptance of what these books tells him is wrong, and discovers his own truth, articulating it himself rather than parroting the texts. At the very core of the play is the question of language, as Abigail and the girls let their accusations fly, and as John Proctor, under Danforth’s relentless pressure, refuses to speak falsely. He will not confess
Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!
A man discovers his ‘goodness’ under the most terrible pressure. A man discovers what is ‘true’.
On a happier note, today I made the first of many raids on the bookshops for holiday reading. For an English teacher there is no more delicious prospect than stretches of time for reading. So beside me is today’s haul: Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn, Paula Meehan’s Painting Rain, David Lodge’s Deaf Sentence, Marilynne Robinson’s Home, John Harvey’s and Michael Connelly’s new thrillers. And a novel by a writer I’ve never read before, Indian Summer by William Dean Howells, written in 1886, and which I bought because it looks like a Henry James substitute, and I can’t really read The Portrait of a Lady again so soon. So I read the start:
Midway of the Ponte Vecchio at Florence, where three arches break the lines of the little jewellers' booths glittering on either hand, and open an approach to the parapet, Colville lounged against the corner of a shop and stared out upon the river. It was the late afternoon of a day in January, which had begun bright and warm, but had suffered a change of mood as its hours passed, and now, from a sky dimmed with flying grey clouds, was threatening rain. There must already have been rain in the mountains, for the yellow torrent that seethed and swirled around the piers of the bridge was swelling momently on the wall of the Lung'Arno, and rolling a threatening flood toward the Cascine, where it lost itself under the ranks of the poplars that seemed to file across its course, and let their delicate tops melt into the pallor of the low horizon.
Excellent: the sense of a story ahead, an adventure into a different time. This is the thrill that those of us who love literature keep on seeking, and there’s no reason why we can’t help our pupils to learn to seek it too: an English teacher who didn’t do so would be failing in a dismaying fashion. It’s perfectly possible to help them get the best marks they can in their exams, and also gain something far more valuable, which will stay with them through life.
Now it’s 9.30pm. Time to ring the bell, pack up the books, turn off the lights and usher them off for a good night’s sleep. In exactly twelve hours they’ll open that paper and begin 200 minutes of writing. But I don’t have to rush. I can amble around the shelves for a while, and then stand in the garden outside, take in the fragrances released by our currently lovely weather, and consider which book I’ll read next after the Howells – the Lodge, the Meehan, the Tóibín?
It’s time to remember that what really matters is what lasts. I hope when these teenagers have finished their exams, after all the wittering and Twittering, there’s still plenty that survives the stress and media maelstrom. I think they’ll remember Macbeth’s guilt, Elizabeth Proctor’s grace, Philip Larkin’s precision. Literature is a store of the permanent truths of human nature. Or as a famous poet once expressed it more memorably: Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.