Back to School #4

Read Back to School #1, #2 and #3.

Annie’s heading back to school today to study her film stuff. Fair play! Good on you girl! That’s what reminded me I never finished this series.

It also reminds me I was working on a film set shortly before going back to school myself. On the last day it drizzled non stop while we were shooting scenes of a country fair. A year later I saw the final product at the cinema and there I was, cheering on a Pit Bull terrier (don’t ask) in glorious sunshine. My hair, such as it is, wasn’t even wet. This must be the magic Annie will be learning at Hogwarts Motion Picture Academy. She may also learn how to make scenes shot at 8am on a Sunday morning in a gay bar look like midnight in a buzzing singles nightclub bursting with hot Russian nymphomaniacs.

But anyway, back to the back to school thing.

Exams. Jayzez! The very thoughts of them had me in bits. Remember the nightmares you had for months about the Leaving Cert? You walk into the hall for your maths exam only to be handed the geography paper. Or the day before French you realise you had no teacher all year and the Head had said to study on your own, but of course you didn’t. Well I had those same ones again in the run up to the set in January of the year one. They lessened after that but never went away totally.

Just arrived in the carpark the morning of my very first exam in 16 years I got a call to say my best friend had died. All academic worries flew out the window narrowly missing a groundsman, fluttered about for a minute then transformed into how I was going to get to the funeral. Could I get flights? Could I afford them? Would their availability mean I would miss more than one exam? On the other end of the line, his wife calmly convinced me that my exams were more important than a religious ceremony that not one of the three of us believed in. I wrote a line at the top of the answer book: Dedicated to the memory of the best friend I ever had. Eemondt, if I make a bollix of this, it’s your fault, mate.

As the weeks passed the thoughts of exams faded. Until the days before the results were due. The hardened students said they’d be out two days before the official date and they were. First class honours in most subjects, 2.1’s in the rest. I was ecstatic and very, very tired and emotional (just like a celeb) that evening.

But hold on. I genuinely didn’t do that well. Okay, I had built up good scores in my lab work which counted for 30-40% of the overall. But I had lost the plot in a couple of exams and knew in my heart, liver and kidneys I’d made a rat’s rectum of them. If I performed as poorly during my primary degree all those years ago I would have been failed or just passed. I knew this because I did and I was.

The standards had slipped. It was obvious when I thought about it. It was glaringly obvious the day year two began when I seen all the people I assumed would fail and not be allowed back. People who quite literally couldn’t string two lines of code together by the end of year one. People who still hadn’t grasped the concept of a binary tree. People who hadn’t the slightest interest in the course.

Marking standards were lowered for sure, but so too was course content and quantity. How often had we been told not to worry about the public static void main (String[] args) line in Java? Apparently we didn’t need to know what it’s purpose was. It might be explained in third year undergrad.

Some of the labs were painfully and embarrassingly simplistic - type this in and see what happens. No need to report your findings. No need to understand why the outcome is as it is. Just observe.

The postgrads told me they had already covered topics like Huffman coding, hash tables and heaps in year one.

You can put on your conspiracy hats and tell me why this is so. I’m sure some of you will have plenty to say. Is it because fees are the lifeblood of a university and accepting all comers into year one and passing them into year two ensures funding? Is it so that Bertie can tell the world how many technical graduates Ireland is turning out each year?

This, needless to say, burst my bubble somewhat. To be honest to myself I would have to be scoring firsts or high seconds to achieve anything worthwhile. That is the goal I then set myself.