The first of this year’s Junior Cycle exams, English, was a balanced and fair paper, but with some surprises, teachers have said.
[ Classroom to College: our essential guide to the exams for parents, guardians and students ]
Kate Barry, a teacher at Loreto Secondary School in Cork and ASTI subject representative for English, said that students and teachers alike were broadly happy with the paper.
However, she said that a question on the moral or lesson an audience may draw from a Shakespearian play may have been tricky for some candidates.
“I would have preferred a more thematic approach, perhaps asking how the playwright ties it all up at the end, as people and life are complicated, and it isn’t always easy to draw simple moral lessons from Shakespeare,” Ms Barry said.
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Studyclix subject expert Sue O’Sullivan Casey from Pobalscoil Inbhear Scéine, Kenmare, Co Kerry, agreed that this may have been tricky for some candidates.
“They may have had some difficulty with this terminology,” she said.
“Another curveball was the question asking candidates to write about a short story in class. This is a new style of question for Junior Cycle English and candidates may not have prepared for this going into the exam.”
Some parents reported that students who said they had not covered short stories during their studies were “blindsided”.
Short stories are on the Junior Cycle English curriculum, but have not featured in the exams to date.
Conor Murphy, an English teacher at Skibbereen Community College, said many teachers may have let short stories take a back seat due to the “overwhelming content” of the Junior Cycle.
“I know many teachers that simply don’t have the time to fit them in. And now we get a 15-mark question on the exam. Time to surface cover everything!” he commented, in a social media post.
Aoife O’Driscoll, junior cycle English teacher at TheTuitionCentre.ie, said the paper, overall, struck a “good balance between familiarity and challenge.”
“The poetry question asked students to reflect on how two poems gave them a broader understanding of the world. This is a task that many will have practiced, though it’s worth noting that the expectation to discuss more than one poem is becoming more common,” she said.
Ms Barry said the ordinary level paper was “really lovely, and it gave good opportunities to write.”
There was a lot of content that students would have felt comfortable with, said Ms O’Driscoll, including an unseen piece based on Kensuke’s Kingdom, a novel by the author Michael Morpurgo, whose books would be familiar to many students.
