course correction

“How old are you?” You’d think that was the only question you’d need to work out how old somebody was, wouldn’t you?

Well as we all know, that is arguably the one question people have asked each other over the years which has received the lowest percentage of truthful replies. People under 25 want to let on they’re older. People over 35 want to let on their younger. Those in between, although seemingly in the prime of their life, still tend to mentally flip a coin and lie one way or another anyway.

And so, in order to allow for this deceit, we are forced to resort to pure cunning to get the answers we want. For example –

“What make was your first computer?”

“Packard Bell” – ok, probably under 18.

“ZX Sinclair Spectrum” – closing in on 40!!!

“Big noisy box with flashing lights and giant swirling spooly things” – over sixty and clearly has been pretty well off all their life too.

Here in Ireland, it seems we have another question you could ask, though this one simply determines whether you’re over or under 35.

“How many points did you get in your Leaving Certificate?”

You see, I thought I did pretty darned good in mine. By best subject was English, although you wouldn’t know it from the last sentence.

I got an overall total of twenty points. After seventeen years of life, and ten in Ireland’s education system, I now had a way of summarizing what good it did me – the number twenty. And that was pretty good.

Trouble is, if I only got twenty points in today’s Leaving Certificate, I’d be lucky to get a job taking down election posters.

The points system itself is relatively straightforward. You do a number of subjects from the curriculum, and having taken, standardized exams in them in the month of June after your final year, your grades from your best six subjects are then turned into points. In my day, you got 5 for an A, 4 for a B and so on down to 1 for an E. There was a slight exception for Honours (Higher) Maths, for if you were brainy enough for an A there, you got 7 points.

I guess whoever had the idea to change the system must have gotten an A in their Honours Maths paper. They realised one day that with over 100,000 students taking the test and that number growing every year, to grade them all with scores ranging from 0 to 32 was bound to produce a lot of ties, which was inconvenient because grading them helped you work out who was going to get the best college courses.

And so, the Department of Education came up with a whole new set of grades, and with it, a whole new set of points. For one thing, you couldn’t just get an A anymore; there were now an A1 and an A2 so the double cream of the crop could rise above the cream.

Makes perfect sense if you ask me. My only complaint is – because the new system is based on different calibrations to the ones I used, I can’t accurately convert my score in such a way that I can impress the impressionable youth of today. I’ll just have to make do by assuming my B was a B2 and my C’s were C2’s and tell you I got 405 points give or take (please give!).

But enough about me. Well, that’s not true, because I want to tell you a story about me, but enough about how I did in my Leaving certificate, or indeed about how old I am.

I’m 38, by the way. OK, NOW that’s enough, and I can talk about how I got one of those C’s.

English was my strongest suit, particularly the writing aspect of it, hence my persistent bloggery. A close cousin of my favourite subject was History. I loved the fact that I understood what was going on, and I loved the fact that I could write about it.

I’m sure it’s no different today. When you prepare for a history exam, you prepare about five or six gargantuan essays, full to the brim with every conceivable fact and date that you can cram into your skull. Walking into a History exam is like preparing for an 800m running race – it’s long but not THAT long, and when you get to the starting line, you patiently wait for the gun and when it goes off, you set off at a firm but steady pace and don’t give up until the bitter end.

This is how I approached my History paper, and of all the topics I had prepared, there was one that I had down to a T. Somebody from my school’s history department greased the palm of someone from the Department of Education enough to make my teacher cast-iron certain that there was to be a question on the Unionists in Northern Ireland.

And so, as I walked into that exam hall for my history paper, I could have told you how all about the planters. I could have told you all about James Craig and gerrymandering. I could have told you how many sugars Ian Paisley liked in his tea.

Though we were to answer four questions from the paper, my plan was to regurgitate my Unionist essay first no matter where it was on the question sheet. This would hopefully settle me down and give me the confidence to answer the rest.

Enter our head supervisor, Mr L.S. O’Shea. That wasn’t his real name, but it IS a clever anagram for Mr Asshole. In fact, why don’t we just call him Mr Asshole.

Surely he appreciated how much pressure was being heaped on us 17 and 18 year olds by this series of 3-hour exams. Surely he appreciated that the last thing we needed was a guy in charge who obviously got his exam-supervision training from the Gestapo.

Already before this exam he had refused entry to boys who were but a few minutes late. Sets the right tone for the other pupils, he claimed. I guess the right tone was to make us think we should ditch our last minute revision at home and leave an hour early for the school to cram behind the bike sheds, because that’s what most of us did.

Anyway – the time had come to hand out our History papers. As always, beginning at the top left hand corner of the room, he began putting the question sheets in front of the students. I was about halfway down the second row, and I was so focused on making sure my Unionism question was there, I didn’t notice the nervous hands that started to go up as Mr Asshole proceeded down the first row.

Eventually he got to me, and he lay the page down before me. It would have made sense for my eyes to scan the page from top left across and down the page, but on account of the tension they danced to and fro over the page looking for the word “Unionism”.

The panic didn’t start to set in because my first couple of dances didn’t find the word. It started because of the words I saw instead.

“Reformation”? “The Tudors”? “The Bronze Age”?

Three years I was preparing for this goddam exam, not ONCE had we covered these areas. In fact, not only wasn’t the magic word there, there was absolutely NOTHING on the page that I knew anything at all about.

Now I knew why the nervous hands were shaking furiously everywhere.

Must be a mistake, I thought. But hang on – this is a national exam so what if they don’t have the right papers anywhere? Will we get them in time to do it? And there’s still the small matter of whether or not the correctors are interested to see my Unionist masterpiece?

I added my shaking hand to the swelling tide. Mr Asshole calmly continued his walk up and down the aisles; in fact I swear he went slower. Once he finally scared the last candidate, he strolled to the head of the room, and then gradually turned to face the class.

“A lot of you seem to have some questions about your paper?” he said smugly.

Much nodding ensued before him.

“Are you wondering about the questions? Do they not make any sense?”

More nodding.

“Tell me – how have I presented all of the papers before now? Have they been face up?”

Less nodding, more shrugs.

“No – I always put the papers face DOWN and ask you to turn them over when it’s time to start. Remember now?”

Even less nodding, more glares trying to convey the message ‘get on with it you sadistic twat’.

“Well what you see before you is a set of questions for those students who chose to do the History exams taken from Course Number 1. Here in this school, we do Course Number 2. These questions are on the reverse side of the page, and you may turn over……NOW. Your time has started.”

And so I turned the page over, and sure enough, there was the magical word “Unionism”, plus everything else I had prepared for.

All I felt at that moment was relief. All I feel now is anger, because now I’m at the age that Mr Asshole would have been then.

If you had asked me my age that day, I probably would have lied, because I would have been afraid you would have thought I was a kid. Truth is though, I WAS a kid. And for someone to have such knowledge and use it to make a roomful of already-freaked-out kids freak out even more, well, it’s downright evil.

And how a school can go three years without making sure all of its History students know there is more than one course is beyond me, but there you go.

Lord only knows where Mr. Asshole is now. Maybe I should find out where he lives, ring the doorbell and run away. That’d show him.

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