Just moments ago I stepped foot into the warm sun of a Tuesday afternoon a very pleased student.

The higher level Irish exam paper offered a range of questions on well learned prose, again in the drama section we were set the challenge to describe two main characters in detail for 20 marks each. No surprises here. Moving forward I was pleasantly amazed to be questioned on such easy poems like the childish ‘Gealt’ or the straight forward poem for love of nature “Faoiseamh a Gheobhadsa”. The final stretch proved a little more challenging with the C section of Cesit 3, but how can we not except a challenge after such a wonderful paper! Every one’s worst nightmare Stair Na Gaeilge followed… An Rúraíocht! Again a banker of a question. However, choosing another question in this section was a little more demanding!

I did find myself falling asleep during the exam this morning, it appears sleep deprivation has indeed caught up with me! Currently I am preparing for the Business Exam, More happy surprises I hope!

Colin.

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This morning I had a fry cooked up for me as promised. What a start to the morning. I ended up setting my alarm for 6am to begin my 2 years revision for the English course. I gambled and decided to learn one poet that morning, having only briefly skimmed through Boland.

As soon as I was seated, I flicked through the paper to see what poet had come up. And lucky I was, there he was, Derek Mahon. The gamble had paid off, having only revised one single poet. I read through all the questions on the paper and then began doing what I like to call, a ‘memory dump’. I began writing out all the names of poems, authors and texts. Then quotes from each poem I had learned that morning.

The Othello question wasn’t as bad as I had expected. I never got around to learning any quotes, so I had to resort to the only one I knew. “Oh honest Iago”. I was tempted at times to make up my own quotes, but I figured that might not go down well. I ended up writing about 5 pages in total, probably having spent a little too much time on the question.

With Othello out of the way I began the Comparative question. Theme & Issue, something I had not prepared for at all. Most people seemed to learn off A standard essays and write them out again. I got caught for time in this question as I got bored during part B and moved on to the Poetry section.

The final section went down quite well, though I found it hard to answer the question properly. I had the knowledge and the quotes so I may have gone off topic a small bit. Oh well.

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