Leaving Certificate English 2022, Paper 1

This morning the Leaving Certificate exams kicked off as usual with English Paper 1. As is widely known, this will change in a couple of years, and if the plan is carried out, students will sit this paper in Fifth Year, an idea that makes no sense, and damages the course substantially, as I explain in this piece on Senior Cycle reform: also see the INOTE response.

Back to the present: today’s paper had the general theme of ‘powerful voices’ (check my final sentence for the irony there) As with last year, candidates had 2 hours and 50 minutes (they were able to drop one section from ‘Comprehending’), and so a lot of time in which to plan, extend their wings and produce the best Composition possible (worth 36% of the entire mark due to the current ‘mitigations’). Comments here on Higher Level only, since we don’t have any Ordinary Level candidates in our school.

The first text brought us back to Joe Biden’s inauguration, and the resonant appearance of the young poet Amanda Gorman, in her ‘yellow coat and scarlet satin headband’. The description was written by Meadhbh McGrath as a magazine article, and candidates will certainly have been able to tune in to something they remember. It also brought literature into the first paper, with a comprehension question on what insights have been revealed ‘into the power of poetry’. This continued into the B question for Text 1, which asked for an open letter ‘on a popular social media platform’ on the value of poetry in the Leaving Certificate course. (How familiar are 18 year-olds with ‘open letters’? How often do they actually post them? How often does anyone post them?).

Next came two pieces from Tom Gatti’s book Long Players, which features personal essays on influential music albums (for the current generation, how significant are ‘albums’?). The Nigerian novelist Ben Okri features (he won the Booker Prize in 1991 with The Famished Road), as he thinks about that immortal album, Kind of Blue by Miles Davis - one hopes candidates will be playing it tonight as they relax after studying. The questions that followed were on the power of music, the impact of music on our lives and on Okri’s style (this will stretch: how are four stylistic elements employed ‘to craft a lyrically beautiful and engaging piece’?). Another contemporary form appears in the B question: the text of a podcast on the importance of music in your life, which will have been very attractive to candidates (though whether the difference between a standard essay and a podcast text is noticeable is another matter).

Thirdly, an Irish writer: Hugo Hamilton, for whom German is a deep personal element, and his novel The Pages, which is narrated by a book by the great Austrian writer Joseph Roth (author of The Radetsky March). The ‘power’ in the first question this time is ‘of books’, maintaining the artistic bent of the previous opening comprehension questions. Then there is an agree/disagree question about censorship, ‘including contemporary cancel culture’ (social media, podcasts, cancel culture - you get the idea), followed by a question on the language of narration, which all candidates should have been ready for. In the B option, you had to write an editorial in a newspaper in 2033: not many 18 year-olds read editorials these days (not many adults either), and so should only have answered this if familiar with the format and register.

And so to the big one: Composition options this time were two personal essays, one speech, two short stories, a discursive essay and a newspaper feature article (the SEC continues to love newspapers despite all the evidence about students’ reading habits).

As usual, the personal options were accessible and attractive: on the ‘faithful companions’ in life (items or objects), and engaging in ‘all kinds of learning’ (a very broad idea). Again the short story option has become much more defined and less open in the past, with one question picking up from the Hugo Hamilton novel; looser and more accessible was option 7, using music/lyrics in a narrative. The discursive essay should have attracted a good number of entries, as it asked candidates to look at some powerful voices in modern life (please, let’s hope they weren’t all Instagram influencers). The speech was on social and cultural values to be promoted by a new President (persuasion here in a campaign) and the feature article on fashion again will have attracted many.

Overall: this is a good appropriate paper for able 18 year-olds, with plenty of options and a decent level of stretch (particularly in the Comprehension questions). It’s also a paper which Fifth Years might struggle with, being as they are less intellectually and emotionally developed: sadly it seems likely that if the Minister’s misguided plan to bring the paper back one year comes to fruition, we can expect a less-interesting or challenging version in the future. There will be less chance of ‘powerful voices’ being expressed.