Colm O'Regan: We should put how to spot a narcissist on the Leaving Cert curriculum

"If there’s one thing that’s surer than a heatwave, it’s that the Leaving Cert will be marked by a vast army of people pontificating about it"

Comedian and Irish Examiner columnist Colm O'Regan pictured in Cork. Picture: Denis Minihane.

Look it’s not that much of a surprise the weather is nice for the Leaving Cert.

We are in June and in the Northern Hemisphere where the sun is directly overhead the Tropic of Cancer — due to Physics and Geography (in fact it might be coming up this year) — so there is a strong enough chance of a nice few days.

If there’s one thing that’s surer than a heatwave though, it’s that the Leaving Cert will be marked by a vast army of people pontificating about it. Some will even pontificate that there is too much emphasis on the Leaving Cert even though they are adding to it by saying so.

I am obviously exempt from that criticism. I have a note and everything excusing me.

But anyway, I am not going to complain about the obsession with the Leaving Cert.

I’m not even going to suggest that the Leaving Cert doesn’t teach you anything about life.

If anything it teaches you a very important lesson: That a lot of the stuff you do in your life is pointless. So yeah maybe we could trim some things from the curriculum.

But honestly, what would I give up? They all have some sort of use. Maybe I do want to write letters to an imaginary French penpal inviting them to stay this summer.

It was very real to me because I was thinking “there’s no room in our house for a sulky French teenager with continental expectations. What would do in Dripsey for the summer?”

I’m promising them excursions and windsurfing, when in fact we would just be hanging around the old mill, smoking.

Get rid of maths? No, I want to do the thing in maths that tells you that you should put milk in the tea straight away because it loses heat in proportion to the difference in temperature. 

I want the bit of Physics that tells you how a fridge works so you stop worrying why it’s so warm at the back of it.

I wouldn’t give up anything from Geography. Maybe I do want to know that Sweden’s key industries include making cutlery. Or look at an aerial photograph of an Irish town and wonder how on earth they got planning permission for that estate that was clearly in a flood plain.

So I don’t know what I would get rid of. However, I would like to suggest one thing. One more exam subject — called Life.

It might sound odd but half of your uncles say on Facebook that they have graduated from the ‘School of Life’ so it wouldn’t be much of a leap.

And look at them now: Happy out as full-time at ‘mad bastard’.

Life would just be an extra module with the top few things you need
to know.

Changing a plug; putting up a shelf; how far away to hold a door for someone; how to send a neighbourhood WhatsApp group message without making everything worse; purify water with your t-shirt; why it’s important to flush a toilet in a bus station rather than covering up the evidence with toilet paper like a squirrel; how to spot fake news, and how to spot a narcissist who just loves the drama,

Yes, it could happen in transition year but that relegates the importance of it.

And yes the parents should be teaching this — but they’re clearly not.

Obviously, you don’t want to fail at Life. That would be rather damning to that message so early. There are no points but it probably isn’t any more pointless than some of Yeats’s stuff.

But at the end, you know a bit more about where you stand.

And leave it at that.