It’s time to park the vitriol

It sounds a bit like a curate’s egg, good in parts and bad in others, this makeshift Leaving Cert, which has just been announced by the department. But the students are happy. They’ve won this battle, apparently, but I hope the victory won’t go to their heads and leave them thinking that life’s a doddle so long as you can get your voice heard above the din.

But now that a final decision has been made and the students are satisfied, can we just give the teachers a break and let them get on with what some say is a gargantuan task. I’m far from an educational expert, but even I can’t see how anyone can impart formative and summative learning side by side, without losing, not just half the class, but all his or her own wits in the process.

SYMPATHY FOR TEACHERS

But there’s little sympathy for the teachers and we have been particularly nasty to ASTI. Compared to student stress, it seems, they’re all having a ball when they’re not trying to disrupt the sacred educational process.

Just over a year ago when we last indulged ourselves in one of those frivolous polls to find the most popular and trustworthy professionals in the country, teachers came in among the top ten – in fifth place actually, with popularity ratings of 89 per cent, well ahead of scientists, judges and weather forecasters, and several miles in front of journalists and politicians – 42 per cent and 32 per cent respectively. Now, I fear that even Norma Foley would beat them hands down.

We haven’t time for such trivialities these days, but it would be interesting to learn where teachers come in the popularity stakes now, seeing that they – some of them anyway – were so reluctant to sacrifice their health and their lives, and the health and lives of their families and their pupils, on the high altar of education.

Their deep and well-founded reservations on the fairness of a trumped-up Leaving Cert were particularly galling to the masses, whose members seem to know everything about learning. But then it’s been quite a while since I had a Leaving Cert student in the house. She was fine, as far as I can recall, apart from being a bit tetchy every time I tried to force feed her with salmon in the hope that it would do for her what it did for Fionn Mac Cumhaill. I was the one who was stressed.

Now, they want blood. ‘Off with their heads,’ the mob was roaring before last week’s decision. Well not exactly, but some enlightened souls were suggesting that a spell on the PUP would do ASTI a power of good and give those teachers a dose of reality. A fat lot of good that would have done anybody!

ARM OF DEMOCRACY

Also, what about a bit of respect for that essential arm of democracy, the trade unions? It suits the Government to let ASTI take the flack in the Leaving Cert controversy because the people who know everything don’t seem to know that it was a lack of planning for every eventuality that caused the problem in the first place. And they’ve forgotten about 1913, a mere eight years after commemorating it with relish.

Teachers, however, shouldn’t be too worried about popularity. Even when they basked in the top ten most trustworthy professionals in the country, nobody, especially the Department of Education, seemed to give a fig about the cruel pay inequity under which many young teachers laboured – and are still labouring. In any case, we really are a fickle race. It’s not that long ago since we were doffing our caps to the bank manager and the parish priest and they’re not exactly top of the pops now either, although in fairness to the clergy, despite all the anti-clericalism whipped up by other know-alls, they can still command a respectable 54 per cent – a full 12 percentage points ahead of journalists. Small thanks that for all our amazing exposes!

So let’s park the vitriol then and give the hard-pressed teachers some slack before they face up the north side of the Eiger without even a rope to hang on to. They all have a Herculean task ahead of them. Actually it’s worse than having to clean out the Augean stables because there isn’t a river they can divert in order to wash away the numerous anomalies in this cock-eyed project.

Anyhow I’m glad that a decision has been made. I was having an early onset of my own annual Leaving Cert’ recurring nightmares, which usually don’t start until early June. Only last night, there I was again, sitting down to the Irish paper, clasping a fountain pen which wouldn’t hold ink and Raftaire an File glaring at me from the ceiling.

But good luck to the Leaving Cert class of 2021. God knows they deserve it. Good luck too to the teachers. God knows, they’ll need it.