Learning Points: New Junior Cert English syllabus is just confusing

By Richard Hogan

I always remember the excitement I felt walking into my English class in Rochestown Capuchin College, Cork.

Tom O’Flaherty was one of those teachers who brought the words of dead poets, playwrights, and authors to life.

I loved the written word: the potential to find something about yourself hidden between the lines of some poem or play excited and thrilled me.

There was a freedom in his class that allowed you to experience those great works viscerally and authentically. And Shakespeare: good god, he blew my head off!

This was a time before Google, so if you came across something that interested you or that you didn’t quite grasp, you had to wait until the next morning, before Mr O’ Flaherty helped you to understand something new about the poem and yourself.

Those penetrating insights were moments of clear apprehension, wonder and joy, and I used to get the same excitement, as a teacher, when I saw the students experiencing English like I did all those years ago.

But something insidious has crept into the classroom and destroyed the experience of the English language, for both the teacher and the student.

And that interloper, that usurper’s cursed head is this new Junior Cert English syllabus. The Department of Education is at pains to convince us it is a huge success, but they protest too much.

It is an unmitigated disaster, because the students do not value it and teachers are struggling to deliver it.

How do you tell students something is worth studying, when you can’t say for sure that it will be on the exam paper?

The exam is where the fruits of all that labour find expression. Sure, I didn’t always achieve what I hoped for in an English exam, but I always knew what I had to study, and there was comfort in that.

But there is no such comfort in this new exam.

Students are now required to study two novels over the course of three years. This could take up to three months of work, writing essays, exploring characters, etc, and they didn’t even test this section in the 2017 honours exam.

I met so many confused students outside that exam, after they had finished. When I relayed this narrative to the person delivering the in-service on the new course, she told me, “but the novel came up on the ordinary paper”.

That’s meagre food for those taking the higher-level paper and the logic of that response is still lost on me.

Why would a student attempting the higher-level paper care about what is on the ordinary paper, or vice versa?

Maybe the tack is to obfuscate so that we leave the meetings more confused than we arrived at them. If that’s the case, it’s a job well done. Of course, we all fight change, and I’ve examined this: is my angst that I have to change the way I teach to facilitate this new syllabus?

Maybe, but I don’t think so. My angst, I think, lies in the fact that I see before me students completely and utterly fed up with the exam they are being forced to attempt, because it is almost undoable. Can someone please explain to me what multiple-choice questions have to do with the English syllabus? Where in the Leaving Cert do they ask, who utters the line, ‘To be or not to be’?:

1. Roy Keane

2. Fungi

3. Hamlet

And I see the fallout of this new course in fifth-year. Those students who were the first cohort to go through this new course are completely at sea.

They have not developed the skills to write coherent and comprehensive essays on major works of literature, because the new Junior Cert course does not ask that of them.

It’s more about reading vast quantities and responding in a succinct and abbreviated way.

The Department says that the premise behind the revamp was so that students would be “actively involved in the integrated skills of oral language, reading, and writing, and in discussing and comparing a wide variety of texts and forms of English.”

That all sounds great. But, as an English teacher, I was sceptical about the speed at which these changes were being rolled out and how different this new course was to the old one, but I knew the old English syllabus needed some tweaking and it certainly had run its own course.

Yet, it became very clear, very quickly, at those in-services, that the vital planning and information were just not in place. I felt sorry for the facilitators, when they were asked questions they just could not answer.

Why is the paper so long and the time so short?

Students are not able to finish this paper. It is demoralising for them, and killing the subject. What’s the Department’s position on that? We were told the Department was very happy with the paper, which was a great relief to all of us, I can tell you.

Where is all this heading?

I can’t help but feel we let something slip away, something precious. I feel for the students of tomorrow. They will never know what it is like to study a great piece of literature and have that tested in an exam situation.

What will we dumb-down next?