Latest news with #LeavingCertEnglish
RTÉ News
05-06-2025
- General
- RTÉ News
Leaving Cert Reaction: English Paper 1 & Paper 2 reviewed
For the Leaving Cert class of 2025 one of the big ones is out of the way - fare thee well English! While there is no need to dwell on things, we are here to help you review the exams with experts sharing their thoughts on Leaving Cert English Paper 1 and Paper 2. Plus, you can download the exam papers for Higher and Ordinary Level below: Leaving Cert English Paper 1 - Higher Leaving Cert English Paper 1 - Ordinary Liam Dingle, English teacher at the Institute of Education takes us through Paper 1. Press play up top to watch the video and read on for more. Key points The paper reflected the world beyond the exam hall and the experiences of modern students. The layout and range of questions was consistent with recent papers. Liam says: "Hopefully, students will leave the exam hall with a sense of satisfaction. There were no artificial barriers or curveballs to startle students facing the rest of their exams. The paper advocated for optimism and the fight of the underdog; hopefully they will have taken that message to heart." Study Hub regular Clodagh Havel casts an eye over Paper 2 in the video above. She describes it as "a testing paper, not necessarily an arduous one but nevertheless students will feel a lot more pushed to react and grapple with the exam than they did yesterday." Her key points "Duality" seems to have been a hidden theme throughout. Some unusual vocabulary will have caused some to pause or feel disconcerted in their approach. Clodagh says: "Many will leave the exam hall feeling that it was a long slog, particularly in comparison to the much more amenable Paper 1. Yet underneath the sometimes excessively worded questions, there was something for everyone. Students who allowed themselves the composure to peel away the layers of the onion will find themselves tired but satisfied."
Irish Examiner
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Colin Sheridan: Paradise lost? Today's teens miss out on beauty of yesterday's poetry
Good weather can only mean one thing: Leaving Cert English paper one. Soundings. The Planter's Daughter versus Paradise Lost. Emily Dickinson vibing on a funeral in her brain. Dylan Thomas's point-blank refusal to mourn. Paddy Kavanagh counting the bicycles headed down to Billy Brennan's yard, hornier than a goat, thirsty at the prospect of chasing a bit of skirt down Iniskeen Road on a July evening. Feeling nostalgic, I reached for a copy of the great green book and started to leaf through its fabled pages. First published in 1969, Soundings — more cultural touchstone than simple poetry anthology — had more reprints than the King James Bible. There isn't a house in Ireland built in the last 55 years that hasn't had a half dozen copies cycle through it. Notes, scribbled in pencil, about the margins. Arrows and underlines elucidating on curious metaphors. A girl's name. A heart with an arrow through it. The lovestruck doodles were poems all by themselves. An introduction from editor and academic Augustine Martin implored students to ignore the glossaries provided in the footnotes. 'Nobody — teacher, classmate, critic or parent — can read a poem for you,' Augustine warned. 'Ultimately, the reader himself must lay hold to the poem and experience it in the intimacy of his own mind. Unless he does this, the whole effort of teaching is at worst a fraud, at best a waste of time.' The front cover of the much-loved Soundings poetry book, which was part of the Leaving Cert English curriculum for many years. Strong words, and ones that my own English teacher taught by. To dare read the footnotes was a cowardly surrender to conformity. He would rather you die thinking Austin Clarke had genuinely lost a heifer if it meant you read the poem your way — even if you misunderstood it — so long as you didn't go straight to the bottom to see what the cheat-sheet said. Sadly, Soundings was dumped off the Leaving Cert English curriculum in 2000 after a significant revision of the English syllabus. This new module introduced a broader and more diverse range of texts, including contemporary authors, modern novels, and film studies. The aim was to modernise the curriculum and move beyond the traditional, predominantly male and canonical selections that characterised Soundings. While the reasoning was sound, one can't help wondering what students today and for the last 25 years have lost by being deprived of the exposure to some of the greatest minds in literature. When you're young and live in your own head, reading Percy Bysshe Shelley's Stanzas written in Dejection near Naples can be quite formative. Especially if you had a teacher who brought it to life, as I had. What happened? Was Paradise Lost too dark, too apocalyptic, too critical of Man's first disobedience, to be trusted in the hands of an 18-year-old? Has the Department of Education ever watched an episode of Euphoria? Perhaps the straw that broke the lost heifer's back was The Planter's Daughter, Austin Clarke's love letter to a beauty so profound, it silenced entire pubs. Nowadays, a line of pure genius such as 'They say that her beauty/Was music in mouth' could be construed as a sentiment a little too close to outright objectification, and therefore be disqualified as leery misogynistic nonsense. If that's the calculation, then, oh, what a loss. Some German students visited our school during my secondary school years. I slow-danced with a young fraulein from Baden-Württemberg to The Pretenders I'll Stand by You at a disco in the town hall, and weeks later, in an effort to keep the romance alive until I was old enough to run away to the Black Forest to lumberjack, I wrote her a letter in which I may have told her that she was 'the Sunday in every week'. The scribbles in the margins were commonplace. In my defence, it was the pre-internet age, and we had bonded over our mutual love of poetry and Dawson's Creek. You miss all the shots you don't take. Weeks passed before a letter arrived with a German stamp on it. 'Why Sunday?' the fraulein asked, obviously unimpressed. 'It's the worst day of the week. It is long and boring, and I get depressed because I have to go back to school on Monday.' Bloody Germans, one might say, but here was a valuable lesson in her cold-eyed critique. 'No poem means quite the same thing to any two readers,' Augustine Martin said, 'or even the same reader at different periods of his life.' The fraulein read it her way, and I read it mine. Nostalgia is a seductive sauce, but I can't help thinking Soundings was something worth keeping in the schoolbags of our kids. How else will teenagers come to know that "beauty is truth, truth beauty'? And "that is all we know on earth, and all we need to know". So too, that "the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven'. When you're young, there's surely no more relatable a sentiment than that.
The Irish Sun
13-05-2025
- Sport
- The Irish Sun
‘Sportsmanship is dead' – St Patrick's Athletic boss Stephen Kenny fumes as injured Forrester ignored before Shels goal
STEPHEN KENNY reckons sportsmanship is dead and gone in the League of Ireland. The 2 St Patrick's Athletic manager Stephen Kenny was left fuming after the injury as he slammed a lack of sportsmanship 2 Pat's Chris Forrester fell to the ground after a hamstring injury during the clash But he paraphrased a poem everyone who studied Leaving Cert English remembers - WB Yeates' September 1913 - when pointing out Shels equaliser came while he was injured. Forrester went out as he stretched to intercept a pass intended for Kameron Ledwidge, and Harry Wood put the ball in the back of the net 28 seconds later. As it was not a head injury, the referee could not stop the game. And But he admitted it was a tough one as he knew Forrester was clearly injured in the instant. READ MORE ON FOOTBALL He said: 'Chris, he just overstretched, he was actually going on goal, he intercepted a pass, he was right in on goal, and Aidan Keena was there too. 'His groin, he just…collapsed. The game was played on, Shelbourne played on, and the rest is history. 'There's no rules anymore, there's no, there's no sportsmanship at all, it doesn't exist now. It's a big change for me coming in, sportsmanship is a thing of the past. 'The previous game, Bohemians didn't give the ball back over something. This one, you know, they play on, the referee doesn't stop it because it's not a head injury. Most read in Football 'But he's obviously in pain, he's in agony on the ground, so it could have went on for 10 minutes. What do you do? 'He's in agony on the ground, so, but that's the way it is, and the rules are the rules. How Newcastle bamboozled Chelsea in battle for Champions League 'So that's the way it is now, it seems to be blanket, there are changes, fundamental changes. 'That's one of the things I noticed (since returning to the league), that sportsmanship is dead and gone, it's with O'Leary in the grave.' Kenny said he has not spoken to his players on whether they should or should not put the ball out for injured opponents as he acknowledged there are occasions he is frustrated by acting. He said: 'I suppose some people exploiting the situations has led it to become like that. 'People, gamesmanship, fellas lying down, trying to get games stopped, things like that, that has led to it. 'But obviously he was in distress, Chris Forrester, he was in real distress when he went down, do you know what I mean? So, that was it. 'The referee should probably stop it if someone's in distress, do you know what I mean? But how do you measure that? It's not easy to measure, I suppose. 'It is what it is, I didn't come in (to speak to media) to harp on about that. But sportsmanship seems to be less and less.' The loss of Forrester for the next four games before the summer break is a blow for the Saints as they look to recover from back to back losses to Derry City and Shelbourne. But Kenny insisted his squad are in a good place. He said: 'We've dropped four points, conceded two injury-time goals in the two Dublin derbies (against Bohemians and Shelbourne). 'That's where we're four points behind the two top teams now, we conceded four points, 1-0 up against Bohemians in the 90th minute…. 'So that's been the difference. So we've only ourselves to blame for that. We can't blame anyone. 'That's the reality. So we must dust ourselves down, a lot went right. We learned from that.'
