Right. Enough with the pessimism. While last year, I found it entirely amusing that I would wind up speaking Japanese in the middle of Irish class, this year, I’m thinking that such antics would probably cause a slight problem. Aside from that, I seem to aquire most marvellous Irish skills while attempting to do german oral work… Is anyone else having this problem?

I’ll close this with a bit of advice (shamlessly stolen from my german teacher). If you wish to succeed in your oral exam, a good idea would be to hunt down a native speaker of whichever language you are doing (german, french, spanish…) and seduce them.

Use them.

Exploit their fluency.

Bribe them if you must.

Good luck =P

-Hey and if any german or japanese people are reading this…………. 

Now then let me paint you a picture its the monday of oral week and I’ve got two days before I’m sitting in front of a examiner. Heres a little extract from a conversation me and my french teacher had today. “Aoife,tell me about your family”( obviously enough she said it french, but well frankly i dont know how too) “well j’ai un soeur and trois soeur, oh wait sorry trois frere. ma soeur s’appelle rebecca. elle et douze ans.” “Shes 12?” “oh no shes vingt sorry” (I lied shes 22)” And whats she doing at the moment aoife, working?”……..silence. Roughly 30 seconds to a minute later and I reply in English, “eh shes not doing much to be honest a lot a hanging around the place”. No doubt at that moment everyone in the room had a similar image of me and what I’d be doing come September. Thankfully my darling teacher moved on then to another student, unfortunately that student appeared to have memorized the entirity of “le francais oral”.

All the mocks arent back yet still waiting on history but so far have got some outrageously average results sum totalling 395. My mediocrity shines brightly with a lovely collection of c’s and a couple of b’s under my belt. Yet here I am, sitting here writing this when clearly my French speaking voice could do with a little work, but hey its not all doom and gloom. Two months to the exams is plenty of time and in fairness more than likely I’m gonna have a lot of fun getting there and so are you. So the next 8 weeks, sure they’re gonna be challenging and your gonna have that stage where you have a minor break down and curse the heavens for inventing pressure like the leaving cert, but for all you “can work harder” and “greater effort needed” students, hey theres light at the end of the tunnel and whenever you think “ah sure I’ll do a bit tomorrow”,try instead to say no I’ll do a bit tonight and in six months I’ll be plastered, but I’ll be plastered in the college I want doing the course i wanted.

LOVE AOIFE!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Leaving-CertNet/253296809652?ref=ts

My final three exams, Chemistry, German and Music were thankfully straightforward and uneventful. Chemistry was a delicious paper and luckily for me the areas I didn’t study either didn’t come up or only came up as a tiny part of an optional question. Trés bon! Unfortunately I did make a silly mistake when I drew a graph plotting atomic number against mass number instead of first ionization energy, but luckily I realised my mistake and had time to redraw the graph and do an extra question just in case.

German was sehr gut aber nicht fantastisch. Keeping with the trend of past Ger,an Leaving Cert papers very odd written pieces came up, like writing about wild animals in the city. I sincerely hope “because of the economic crisis, people cannot afford food and may kill and eat wild animals” counts as “a dangerous situation which could arise from wild animals in the city”.

Music was as good as music was always going to be, by which I mean I didn’t do a wonderful exam, but neither did I fail epically, although the last phrase of my melody was a cross between Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca and We Wish You A Merry Christmas. I also modulated without using any sevenths, so I hope to god it sounds like an obvious modulation.

The night before the HPAT results I had a dream about the results in which I got 460 points and was delighted with myself. Of course upon waking I realised that that’s an impossible score but went to check my email still with my happy buzz from that nice dream. It only took a few minutes for that happy buzz to be replaced by bitter disappointment and then despair, followed gradually by acceptance. I did not get a good HPAT score. Oh sure, I did better than the majority of people, but that’s not enough. Even if I got six A1s, which I know I haven’t, I could get a maximum of 720 and I just don’t think that’s going to cut it. After moping around my house on my own for a bit, I decided that Human Health and Disease, if I get it, does sound like a pretty cool course. I’m thinking that I’ll do a year of that but also spend that year doing logic and spacial awareness problems, and hopefully I can improve on my HPAT score next February. Even though I’ve accepted my useless HPAT score, I still get a sinking feeling of inadequacy every time I think of it, which is part of the reason I avoided blogging about it for so long. Fortunately being in another country with a different language and culture where I can practice French, the love of my life, is a welcome distraction, and in between sunning myself and ogling tanned French boys at the beach, I’ve come to accept that come September, I will not be a med student.

(on an entirely different note, I saw this on my balcony the other night…)

…then I woke up and it was all a dream.

Yeah I just said that. That ending to every story that you think is the best twist since Bruce Willis Was Dead at the End of the Sixth Sense, until you’re told by your Junior Cert English teacher to never, ever use it to end a story.

It’s true though, on Wednesday night, two days before my exam I had that horrible horrible nightmare. Luckily for the real thing I brought along the right document, didn’t burst into tears and had the nicest examiner I could have hoped for. No nasty questions were asked, the strangest one I got was to talk about the Basque region which was fine as my parents do tend to go on about it to me somewhat. I was so grateful that the examiner managed to seem interested and enthusiastic even though I must have been the 110th person to speak about a music festival. There was no economy, no politics, no international relations, no health system, no environment, Just Me, Myself and I (and the Basque Region)

I even managed to throw in a cheeky little off-the-cuff subjunctive despite my nerves!

German didn’t go quite so well. The general questions were alright, though I got stuck on the question “what sort of music do you like?” which really just requires naming a load of bands, but I completely blanked and couldn’t rememver any music I liked, which was silly seeing as my Projekt was on a music festival!

The rest of the questions were fine though and I managed to stick in my little piece on how hard German is compared to French. The Projekt was fine, I remembered my big long spiel thankfully, though I did get asked “what do the girls have in their mouths?”. They had whistles, I hadn’t a clue what whistles were in German so I just admitted I didn’t know the word and tried to smile (but probably ended up grimacing)

For the roleplay I got the Fish one, the one I really really didn’t want. It was ok though, even if I forgot one of the tasks and stuck it in a minute later making the conversation go like:

“well would you like a hamburger then?”

“…besides, this fish is cold! The sauce wasn’t bad but is now also cold!”

“I understand…how ’bout that hamburger?”

I’m happy with how both orals went though and it’s such a relief to think that 25% of each exam is over and done with. I had no idea how exhausting they’d be as I’ve slept for 22 hours in total since Friday night. From now until Tuesday will be spent watching TG4 and calling it study.

To everyone else doing the orals next week- Go n-eirí an t-adh libh!/Bonne Chance!/Viel Gluck!

And so, in order to distract myself from all that German, and also to adhere to the quota of posts per week (quota, what quota?), I thought about those moments when I was mentally paralysed and decided to bore anybody who is reading this into leaving the site and (hopefully) getting some study done. Because something wicked this way comes. Mocks, anyone?

1. I actually asked my biology teacher, when we were doing respiration, why humans couldn’t breathe under the sea when water has oxygen dissolved in it. 5.7/10 on the Retard scale. (1 being stupid and 10 being Jessica Simpson in Newlyweds)

2. Last week, the best excuse I could blurt out when asked why I don’t do after school study, was that I had to walk my dog. Which is wrong for two reasons: I don’t walk dogs. And I don’t have one. 2.3

3. 65 cents + 65 cents? 1 euro 10, of course. 7.8

4. When my bio teacher reached my name while taking the role, I let her know I was in class by saying, with the most exaggerated German accent possible, “Ja?” 8.1. And I’m quite sure she did not forget I was there.

5. Being stuck during a particularly hard English exam – pen in mid-air, eyebrows furrowed – because I could not spell “draw”. 10.0

I’m sure there must be more, but right now, that’s all I can care to think of. In these tense few weeks leading up to the mocks, taking some time to laugh at myself really takes the edge off.

I am at a great advantage to a lot of students doing German on Friday. That I can’t deny. To me it will be my backup plan since Irish and Maths wont be providing me with any point-worthy results.

So put on your Lederhosen, eat up your bratwursts and get ready to sit yet another boring exam!

Today I finished my final Oral examination. My Irish and German Oral completed, along with the music practical exam completed. And the feeling is great. But what now?

Mood wise I am better than ever. I enjoy the day of school in a way I have never enjoyed it before. Which is a sure sign that it is time for me to get out of there. And by that I don’t mean I enjoy sitting there listening to the droll voices of teachers who’s own enthusiasm to teach is at the same level of the majority of students willing to learn. And I don’t blame them.

I sat there day after day wondering when it would hit me. Hit me? Yes, that burst of motivation that hits most students around this time of year all over the nation. I feel like I’ve missed that train, and was left behind. Me and a hand full of other students in the same position as myself. Surely I want to do well to get into college. And I do, I really do. But I have not an ounce of motivation inside me, to sit in a class and be told what to do.

To me the pre’s were of no benefit at all. I missed a day due to illness which affected two of my exams. I had not completed course work to be reviewed which affected a further 3 of my exams. And I got no result on one subject, as the school managed to lose my exam answer sheet. Doesn’t get any better than that.

So here I am. Laughing about the Mocks. Enjoying the weather and making the most of the last few weeks I will spend in school with my friends. Only thing left for me to do is, find the train I failed to jump aboard a while ago.

Just a note of the dates

7th – Start date for Leaving Certificate Oral tests in:

• Irish
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Italian
• Russian
• Japanese

I’d like to wish all my fellow students the best of luck.