I sit and wait and write…

It’s that time of year again. The sun peeps out from behind the clouds, the clothes shops wipe the dust off their summer collections and sixty odd thousand 6th Year students lock themselves in little rooms and attempt to cram every last morsel of knowledge into their brains, in order to regurgitate it into little pink answerbooks on the morning of June 6th.

Yes, the dreaded Leaving Cert is upon us and the scramble for points is underway, with legions upon legions of students entering the no man’s land of examination halls armed with a bottle of water, an extra biro and nerves of cotton candy.

Exams are strange things. Illogical, stressful, strange things serving to represent in two and a half hours the final product of 14 years hard graft.

As one of those sixty thousand, I too have felt the pain.

We’ve all heard the nightmare stories about the poor unfortunate who broke her wrist the night before the exam and had to talk it all onto a tape recorder, or the guy who thought his exam was in the afternoon when it was really in the morning and wound up having to repeat the entire year.

We’ve been bombarded with mantras of “Points! Points! Points!” and “Six hours study per night” since September. Well-meaning newspapers have crafted out study plans for us and innumerable websites have claimed to possess the greatest study tips ever. Sales of revision books, past exam papers and prompt cards have rocketed. And it’s all because of the Leaving Cert.

I for one have fallen victim to the pressures.

My study room reeks of soothing Indian incense. Piles of notes, photocopies, textbooks, revision sheets and history essays tremor precariously in their lofty heights and pages of CAO forms, the Change of Mind, countless prospectuses, sure-fire hot-topic lists and timetables are crammed into any available nook or cranny that will oblige with the extra space.

Coloured crystals line the window ledge, little green homeopathic memory tablets adorn the desk and the soft, sweet tones of Beth Orton and Jeff Buckley reverberate throughout the house, somewhat chastised by the odd blast of a stress relieving Crass record.

Unfortunately, my relaxation techniques didn’t work very well and I was still a nervous wreck walking into the examination hall at 9:20 on English morning. Luckily for me, I had been granted the small pleasure of a desk near the wall. My theory was that if I happened to freak out and collapse, at least the wall could hold me up.

Plus, there’s something unnerving about sitting in the midst of a sea of scribbling examinees. It makes you feel like you aren’t writing enough – or too much. The English papers themselves weren’t too bad, even if a little wacky. The first one was themed on ‘Irishness’, and the things that characterise such an attribute. (Awkward, then, for one of my classmates who had only moved to Ireland a year and a half ago.)

The Big One came on the Friday, with the much dreaded History exam. We were terrified. Absolutely terrified. For the hour before, we sat in complete silence in room nineteen frantically reading over our neglected special topics, lengthy Stalin essays and the economic policies of Fianna Fáil– hearts thumping, sweat pouring and stomachs butterflying. However, the fear turned to fortune when we saw the paper, which wasn’t actually that horrible, and at 5:20pm, the joy of having completed arguably the most arduous, lengthy and downright scary course on the Leaving Cert was reflected by sympathetic parents, who bought me celebratory chocolate.

But, unfortunately, the relief didn’t last for long, and my nose was soon back in the books for maths paper two; however, not before I had ferreted out all remaining history notes and chucked them in a big black sack, in preparation for my ceremonious post-exam Burning of the Books in the garden.

Having gotten French out of the way, next in line is History of Art, followed by Music next week.

There’s a bit of a break in between, so for the last few days I’ve been experiencing that notorious mid exam slump: mind numbing day time telly, the odd Degas program on the Biography channel and absolutely no will to study. The art history course is actually quite a long one, but despite my good intentions, all notions of actually giving a damn have been slowly eroded by the anticlimax of the last few exams.

For all its hype, the Leaving Cert has boiled down to little more than a sheet of paper on a desk. Insignificant, really, in the grand scheme of things. (No doubt my nonchalance and retrospective wisdom will morph into tears of bitter disappointment when the results come out on August 15th.) But until then, the torment shall continue.

As Jennifer Johnston said in our English comparative study, “I sit, and wait and write…”