Student stress is a lesson for Mr Quinn

IT’S exam season.

You can hear the sighs and groans of anguish from students.

I’m only in fifth year and I’m feeling the strain. Keeping my social life intact, my school work together, and my head screwed on is difficult work. So God bless the Leaving Cert students.

I feel for them and I know the ‘start of college’ excitement will help them through the exams, but are teachers being fair on students?

I’m doing eight subjects to get my college place. Eight subjects means eight or nine classes a day. That’s more than a dozen pages in homework. Think of all the ‘revising’. Do I need to study all these subjects to get into a journalism course? According to the State, I do. I need to study subjects that don’t even relate to journalism.

Imagine students who are doing nine, ten, eleven subjects. How do they manage? Some students train for a sport three or four nights of the week, followed by matches, in addition to school. The chances of them burning out is high. That should not be allowed.

The Department of Education think it’s hilarious to randomly introduce new courses. Sorry, Mr Quinn, but I do not appreciate you throwing me a new maths course on stuff I will never need to know. I don’t appreciate having only two years to learn a six-strand course. Not impressed, Quinn, not impressed.

Unless you’re doing LCVP, you do not gain anything from these courses that could help you in the future. I can’t figure out how much I owe, for example, on a mortgage, I can’t repair a plug, I can’t cook (unless I do home economics), I can’t calculate taxes, I can’t write a CV, I can’t do simple, daily tasks. Yet, wait for it, I can tell you the theorem of Pythagorus, because that’s well and truly going to help me write an article. Think I’m the only person that hates Project Maths? Ask every student in the country.

The Department should sit back and think. They are stressing teenagers out, not educating them. Wait for the students to go off-the-rails and end up repeating. So, when rethinking a new course outline, the Department should ask ‘what do students really need to know’? Do they need to know how to use the formula and tables book, or do they need to know basic life skills? We need to know how to construct a sentence, how to write letters, how to write CVs, how to fill a form and how to do day-to-day tasks.

Remember, students, Steve Jobs and Simon Cowell got on just fine with minimal education.