‘Excellent paper with little room for rote learning’

A VERY fair paper for students who take themselves seriously, was how teacher Thomas Ahern described the Leaving Certificate higher level English Paper 2.

Mr Ahern, of the Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI) and Scoil Chonglais, Baltinglass, Co Wicklow, noted the “curious and interesting” theme of power struggles, both within characters and between characters, that sweeps across the paper in all different texts and sections”.

Another teacher, Fintan O’Mahony, described it as an “excellent paper with not much room for rote learning.”

Mr O’Mahony, a subject representative with the Association of Secondary Teachers’ Ireland (ASTI), said it was like Paper 1, in that was pitched at candidates who were good readers as well as good students.

In a comment on the ques- tion about ‘Hamlet’ being a “disturbing psychological thriller”, he said “it put the play in a modern context and that is where you would expect a good reader to be at.”

Another example of what Mr O’Mahony liked was the question on Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’. Here, students were given an opportunity to address whether the novel was a “frivolous romance with limited appeal”.

Mr O’Mahony, a teacher at Scoil Mhuire, Carrick-on-Suir, Co Tipperary, said “if you like ‘Emma’, you could defend it. It was a great idea.”

He described the Comparative Study section as “lovely”, noting that candidates had to compare three texts, rather than two. “There is no way you could get away without doing three texts.”

Mr Ahern described the poetry section as “generous, with a good spread of poets from different backgrounds”. Teacher Jim Lusby said nobody could complain about the poets, with three of the “near certainties”, Boland, Donne and Keats, turning up, Mr Lusby, of the Institute of Education, Dublin, said the “facile debate about which poets appear is dead. Of far more importance is the subtlety of the phrasing in the questions, with a thought-provoking phrase or concept in each, such as ‘penetrating truths about society’, ‘a range of profound tensions’ and ‘life’s harsh realities’.” Mr O’Mahony said the ordinary level paper was “very good, and a lot of students came out smiling. It included a question on Donal Ryan’s ‘The Spinning Heart’, the newest text on the reading list.