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by Chloe Power

34 days, 11 hours, 33 minutes, 14 seconds

May 4, 2011 in Study

Have to love having a countdown to the Leaving as your homepage.. Well, it makes a difference from having Facebook there, I’m trying to minimize distractions! Clearly it doesn’t work, since I have a CSI marathon on, with Skype, MSN & FB chat open. Yeah, I really don’t want to study. After a night of cramming for LCVP, I signed outta school today and collapsed into bed. I don’t really know why I stayed up, seeing as a Distinction is quite hard to get, plus I may not count it for points at all. ( I got a Distinction in the mocks & didn’t count it) but I think it’s about just wanting to do well! Wasn’t too bad anyway, though was it just me, or was it kinda different to past papers? Could only do four long questions to be honest (Q1, 3, 5, 6) but AV was handy though, so optimistic overall :)

So really, it’s been.. A while. A lot has happened, so should probably get typing! Mocks went pretty well, stressed slightly over it but got better results than I expected. A1 in Biology, A2 in Geography & English, B1 in German & Home Ec, B3 in Irish & Home Ec, and then.. D1 in Ap Maths. Spot the odd one out! But it added up to 525, which is encouraging! Also, orals. Irish went brilliantly. Not saying I got an A or anything, but I like Irish oral. It’s much stronger than my written/aural skills, and I feel like it went a lot better than my mock one. The examiner was an absolute pet, though I’d heard that he was barely letting people talk & interrupting them, but I badly needed to do well, so I was like HELL NO! I almost ended up shouting at him, but he commented at the end that it was a nice conversation & he didn’t feel a need to talk, which I think is positive. Ironically, I find German oral much harder, though my written & aural is loads better. My Irish accent is just so strong that I cannot do a German one at all! General conversation was awful, she wouldn’t let me direct the conversation & I started panicking and gave stupid answers, like “I chatted with my sisters in Spain. We went for walks. I ate Irish food.”  But thankfully, the Picture Sequence was Ruhestorung, and it went well. Roleplay was the passport one, which isn’t too bad. So hopefully my A1 is still achievable!

Easter study.. Well it was up-and-down. It started off so well, I was doing my school timetable for study, then in the evening I did the work teachers gave us. But it’s quite hard to study when your family goes away and leaves you with a free house for five days.. Cue panicked finishing off essays & doing all those ‘little things’ that end up taking so much time last Sunday & Monday! I’d already forgotten what school was like, & I find myself sitting in classes when teachers start talking about how much we need to get done, or complain about people missing school, etc, just thinking about what I could be getting done at home! But I know that’s not a good idea, especially when ‘m not finished some courses & could really use the revision. So I’ll hang in there! Well, I plan on trying to get a couple of Ap Maths qs done before I switch over to LAw & Order SVU (I work best at night) so I better head.

Bye! :)

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Avatar of valerie

by valerie

And all of a sudden, it was May.

May 1, 2010 in Study

I’m sorry for my big break in posting there, I was tremendously busy these past few weeks with orals and practicals and history projects and getting mildly obsessed with the new Doctor Who and…wait, where was I? Oh yes.

Orals went well, I think. My year had heard some horror stories from the repeats – their French examiner was pregnant, hormonal and had some sort of personal vendetta against every French student in the school. So when a tiny, wispy haired little pink marshmallow of a woman walked in to the library to give us the “Don’t be worried! Yeer GRAND” talk the whole year breathed a collective sigh of relief. She lived up to her nice little-old-lady image, thank God - she handled my “Colin Firth!” reaction when she asked if I’d seen the Pride and Prejudice film quite beautifully.
Irish was better, which was bothersome considering I prefer French. Even so, I got lost a little and didn’t articulate myself to the best of my ability (“Ahm, deanann an, umm…”) but I was more composed and together than in French.
Practicals were fine although my voice was a little wrecked by the time I got to my 6th song and I let out a few horrible squeaks, much to my distress. I agonised over those squeaks, my gappy Irish and my mumbled French for a couple of days, running through every second I could remember both in my own head and to anyone around who would listen, until I had to be reminded that the orals and practicals are OVER, FINITO. YAY!

Last Thursday saw me handing up dear old Harvey Milk for the last time and finally finishing the harrowing ordeal that is writing the Extended Essay. Now that was a relief. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that I’d be able to write a 2,000 word essay, let alone the required 1,500, yet I managed to shoot over and above what was needed and paid for it dearly in editing. Editing isn’t fun, especially when you think everything is necessary. Eventually I got the thing down to about 1540 words, still over the target but it’ll have to do. One piece of advice I will give any 5th year History student out there: Please choose something you are interested in and want to learn about for the RSR, or you’ll just drive yourself absolutely nuts. Take it from me – I went half-crazy and I actually liked, nay, loved my project.

So that just about brings you up to speed on what’s going on chez Valerie at the moment. I have my Art (Craftwork, life-drawing etc.) next week. I’m playing it safe and doing a poster, considering my modelling went horribly in the mock. At least I’ll leave the art room with something that looks like a finished product, as opposed to a damp grey lump of clay that you have to mind like a little baby in case anyone touches it and it’s trunk/arm/head gets squashed or falls off. (Clearly, I hate clay.) I haven’t done much prep work for it yet, so that’s next on my long long to do list.

Sigh. I can’t believe it’s May. I keep saying it, but I hate how fast this year has gone. I don’t feel the slightest bit ready. When I think of the Leaving Cert as a whole, I start freaking out, yet when I think about it in terms of separate subjects it doesn’t seem so scary. I guess we all just have to keep doing that, taking it one day at a time, subject by subject. We’re GRAND. :)

Someone should write a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Leaving Cert. They’d make a killing.

Valerie

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by guest-blogger-aoife

Je ne comprends pas : The Leaving Cert Orals 2010

April 12, 2010 in Study

So then eight weeks and its all over, eight weeks? Thats it.A nice round two months and you’ll never have to say pardon madame, je ne comprends pas la question. Seems like yesterday I was walking the crowded hallways for the first time. I’ll be honest I’ve never been much of a worker and I’ve managed to scrap by the last five years with a lot of “not working to full potential” and “needs to concentrate”. Needless to say then Easter was what i like to call a study disaster, I left with such good intentions and arrived back with a throbbing head, several unseemly scratches and more than a few hours missing from a couple of good 18ths a colourful bank holiday and a rainy visit to dundalk racecourse.

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!

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Avatar of valerie

by valerie

Ce n’est pas un blog post.

April 7, 2010 in Study

It’s the day of the French oral. I wait patiently in a small room, feeling confident. I am called into the examination chamber (I was going to just call it a room but chamber sounds nice and fancy) and, strangely, there are quite a few people in there. I am confused. I sit and the examiner starts talking to me in English.
“Talk in French! Why haven’t you put on the tape?” I cry.
“Shut up you,” she snaps back.
I make some feeble attempts at French conversation, she remains unresponsive. Eventually she turns to me and produces a packet of chewing gum from her pocket.
“Fine then. If you’re so smart, describe this chewing gum to me!”
I panic, I do not know the French word for chewing gum. Why is she doing this to me?
She puts on the tape, but music starts coming out. She starts dancing and singing along. She throws a book at me.
“Read that,” she spits.
I start to cry. My English teacher enters the room and sings at me as tears roll down my face.

I wake up whimpering and shaking my head feverishly, frozen for a few moments in utter terror. Then I realised it was only a dream, I had not just screwed up my oral over a description of chewing gum. What relief!

Thankfully, I’m not terribly worried about my French oral. The Irish oral is a different kettle of fish, however. I have an excellent Irish teacher who in her spare time must also be the totalitarian dictator of a small country as she controls every aspect of our Irish-speaking lives, including our oral material. She’s basically given us everything we know in the form of notes and handouts and while this is totally awesome in terms of the quality of the Irish and it all looks beautiful written down, not much of it is in my head. I have around two weeks to get it in there though, and some of the questions I KNOW we won’t be asked (the sheet of questions she gave us must be from 20 years ago…Example: What do you think of the situation in Ulster? She made us learn an answer to it, in the future tense. There will be peace etc etc. WTF?)

I received a letter from Trinity a while back containing a questionnaire for the English and Drama Studies course, which I filled out hurriedly and horribly while trying to prepare for History grinds and which has more tip-ex on it than actual ink. However, it seems they didn’t mind that or the hopelessly contrived answers as I now have to go to an interview/workshop thing on the 20th April. Woo, go me!
Except not really. That week happens to be the week of my Irish oral and Music practical. Yeah. I don’t know if all schools do their orals/practicals at the same time, but gosh Trinners! How am I going to work that out at all – as the French say, on verra…

I must get going and do some study. Grrr.

Valerie

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Avatar of ronan

by ronan

Be Mature, This is Formal Oral.

March 6, 2010 in Study

I’ll put my hands up and admit it, occasionally I will laugh when particular emphasis is placed on the word oral in a classroom. Some people laugh at the result 69% in an exam, but sniggering at the word oral is my dirty little secret. However that doesn’t mean I’m going to discard it as a Chelsea centre-half discards his marriage. Sorry, like a Chelsea defender discards their marriage, that makes more sense. I had an epiphany last week, a good oral puts you on the road to a decent grade, and it’s lying there for the taking like an unguarded Trocaire box (I’ve never stolen, it’s purely an expression). 25% right? It’s around there anyway, correct me if I’m wrong.

Personally, I lick my lips at the thought of a nice bit’a oral in the cramped room in my school where they’re carried out. Not because it’ll be easy and effort-free however, because of course you can carry out your oral without killing yourself, but to reap the benefits, work needs to be put in. I’m lucky however, as I’ve always had a knack for the oral.

I sit down and flirt, charm, or man up if necessary, and have a right auld chat with the cupla focail en Francais that I know and come out delighted as the examiner just smiled at me and smiled at me and smiled at me. I can tell that the examiner enjoyed sucking the sentences out of me like Paris Hilton would enjoy testing Christiano Ronaldo’s Portuguese native tongue. Of course after last year I now realise that for all the beaming and confidence, you can’t beat knowledge.

To be fair I did get decent grades in mock orals, it was about the only thing I scored moderately acceptably at in honours Irish last year. But needless to say I still failed, and it goes without saying that had I practiced my oral beforehand, I wouldn’t be typing here. Of course there are questions I wouldn’t have been able to answer even if Seachtain na nGaeilge was named after me, such as what did I think about Davy Fitzgerald bringing his Waterford hurlers to a Bernard Dunne fight the night before a league game in Parnell Park after I told the examiner that I enjoyed shtick an’ ball. However I could’ve whipped out all these impressive, lengthy sentences when asked the simple questions, and that would’ve made my E a D3! Oh well, c’est la vie.

As for French, it’s very much the same. Learn, practice, and sweet Jesus if you don’t know you’re document well don’t bring one into the interrogation! I do think that sums French up.

Will I be kind and explain how TG4 and TV5 do wonders for your Irish and French respectively? Go’wan sure why not, I can’t say I’ve studied off it but I know some people recommend it. Plus, Irish is pretty shit cool nowadays innit. And we should aim to do well in it, it’s part of our culture. And as for French, that’s pretty out of this world too de nos jours oui? Learn some phrases from those and I’m sure you can throw them in to woo the examiner.;) Don’t be a Snorlax, I’m sure Annah would agree.

And remember the person opposite to you doesn’t want you to fail, they’re wicked nice, and it would only delight them to give you a great grade, and thus a great start for the written paper come June.

Oh and apologies, I’m after forgetting about the minority languages, so this one’s for the Bundesrepublik Deutschland.

Fine I’ll be honest, I was just looking for an excuse to play that. But in all seriousness don’t undermine the importance of orals. Now let the innuendos and immature jokes commence!:) What’s with the word knob-rowing in Sliocht 1?:P;)

Merci Beaucoup agus Slan.

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