Leaving Certificate English 2024: Paper 1

First of all, here’s my article now on the Irish Times site about the Leaving Certificate and more, including the false narrative of ‘rote learning’ in English, which partly came out of this 2021 post. Plus some additional notes. Added Thursday: Paper 2 (Literature).

Paper 1 is also mentioned, still thankfully at the end of the course rather than damagingly half-way through it, and this morning as usual it kicked off the Leaving Certificate period. Here are some comments on the Higher Level paper (none of our candidates took Ordinary Level).

The, er, connecting theme this year (if anyone really pays attention to it) was ‘Connections’, which could cover almost anything. Two contemporary Irish writers produced the first two comprehension pieces, with Fintan O’Toole of the Irish Times writing - unusually, given his normal feature pieces - about birds, and the ‘Dead Zoo’, the Natural History Museum in Dublin, in this piece from January 2023 [subscribers only]. A personal piece, it is also marked by a sense of loss:

I could not avoid the melancholy realisation that birds that were common in Ireland can now be seen only through the glass of display cases.

By the way, here are my comments on Fintan O’Toole’s personal history of Ireland We Don’t Know Ourselves, comparing it to Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These.

The three questions that followed were all straightforward and in a predictable format (information/opinion/style).

The other Irish author has also been much in the news recently, with Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting being shortlisted for last year’s Booker Prize, and winning other awards. This extract was appropriately about two teenage girls in the story, Cass and Elaine, so teenagers were the ones to assess Murray’s vision of young people here. Again, straightforward comprehension questions.

The final piece was by Monisha Rajesh, author of the book Around the World in 80 Trains, who in March 2023 wrote a travel article called ‘To Istanbul by Train’. See the illustrated original from the Financial Times.

It takes in Strasbourg, Austria and other countries on the way, and is richly descriptive, so offering plenty of material for candidates. The opinion question here was about how young people can protest or demonstrate views, which offers good possibilites.

The three B essay options (short directed tasks) were: a dialogue between a young person and an adult about a contentious issue (could be interesting, and requires the candidate to switch between attitudes and registers), a proposal to a Tidy Towns committee about a project, and a series of reflective diary entries (I’m wondering - are personal diaries in decline in the smart-phone world?).

At the end of the paper comes the most important part of all, the main Composition worth 25% of the overall marks in English: two short stories, a popular magazine article, a speech, two personal essays and a discursive essay. No descriptive piece for a while now.

Both personal essays offered plenty of scope: on puzzling aspects of life and on our relationship with the natural world, and the speech option offered similar scope (on the accelerated pace of modern life, which could well have overlapped with that second personal essay, though of course the register would need to have been different).

The discursive essay looked like it was set up for a consideration of the effects of social media and electronic world, in examining the possibility/desirability of privacy. Similarly, the popular magazine article (again, just how many magazines do today’s teenagers actually read?) was about the connections which enrich teenagers’ lives. Finally, the two short story options - and these really are always pretty demanding on the spot and in the time available - were a little less contorted than recently, being on a connection between the past and present in a family or group of friends, and set among a group of strangers on an eventful train journey (a well-worn path in fiction and film).

So overall that was an accessible paper, which will have started most candidates off in positive spirits before tomorrow’s literature paper.

See here comments on last year’s Paper 1.