Imagine if life were like the mocks – just redo the bits you get wrong!
IMAY not have one in my own house this year, but I am surrounded by the mocks. They have messed with my youngest’s timetable so that she comes in for her lunch 40 minutes earlier than usual – which you might think would be relatively easy to remember, but you would be utterly wrong; they have fecked up the bus timetable, with gangs of students spilling out of various school gates along my usual route at most inopportune times, and on the bus itself, all the talk is of these unseasonal exams that, in the end, don’t count for anything at all.
I was actually against the mocks – in much the same way as I am broadly opposed to the entire structure of State examinations – but having survived five of these strange periods of fake examinations over the past few years, I can finally accept that it is probably better to write far too much for the first question in a meaningless exam in February than it is to go stone mad come June.
That said, they do seem to me to be terribly early – my memory of my own mock exams is that they happened just before the State exams proper, with only enough time between the two for my English teacher to warn me that, based on the dog’s dinner I’d made of the rehearsal, I would probably fail the real thing. Nowadays, though, the mocks will be done and dusted by the end of next week – and barely a crocus pushing through the ground – meaning that for the next four months, students will do nothing but revisit, revise, rote learn and run through endless past papers.
In the case of Leaving Cert students at least, facing into their last breath of State education, that seems to me a real shame and a wasted opportunity. We will shortly demand that these young people vote, and yet it sometimes feels that all they really know of the world is that you shouldn’t spend more than 18 minutes answering a history question.
Still, that’s what the mocks are for. Didn’t realise there were five – not four – picture stories in the Irish oral? That’s what the mocks are for. Wrote too much for the first question and ran out of time? That’s what the mocks are for. Only studied half the course, because you gambled on Eavan Boland coming up? That’s what the mocks are for. Out of milk? That’s what the mocks are for.
Well, why not? The mocks have become such a formative part of education for teenagers up and down the country, that it might be worth considering extending them to the broader world. Screwed up your job application, your home renovation, that first date? Never mind, that was only the mocks. It only counts – it’s only real – when we decide it is.
It could be a brave new world. You make a hames of the job interview, then you pop your head back around the door and tell the interviewer that was only the mock, before taking your seat again for the real thing. If you miss out on a house you’re bidding for at auction, then you can simply declare it a mock auction and eyeball your rival bidder out of the process for the re-run version.
IF your wedding photos don’t come out as you’d hoped, you can declare the whole wedding a mock and re-run it (actually, my understanding of wedding rehearsals is that we’re quite close to actually adopting this practice).
Like small children putting on their own show, we could all literally start everything over as many times as we wanted until we were satisfied that we’d given the best version of ourselves. Sure, it would be time-consuming, but just imagine the perfect world we could live in if we extend the mocks to every area of our lives. Don’t like this column? Just hang on, the chances are the ‘real’ version is on its way.
But of course, if real life was just a rehearsal, then there’d be a hell of a lot of lines to learn. And discounting everyone’s mistakes and all our warts and flaws might make the world prettier, but there’s only so much vanilla anyone can take. What the mocks don’t teach our teenagers is that life and its players are shaped as much by mistakes and failures as by their shining success.
In the end, when it comes to learning how long to spend answering exam questions, the mocks are quite useful. But real life, thankfully, is much more interesting than that.