Coming up to the Leaving Certificate, everything is broken into bite-sized pieces. We have it drilled into us by teachers that if we can learn four reasons for the breakout of the second World War, or three examples of coastal erosion, we will get those 15 marks that will push us from a C1 to a B2.
The Leaving Cert is so prescriptive that we go home each night knowing what chapters we have to learn and if we’re not meeting our goals we find out in Christmas tests and pre-exams and all manner of ongoing assessment. If the Leaving Cert is spoonfeeding, college is hunting for food on the vast African plains. If you don’t chase it, you’ll starve.
The start of college begins the process of trying to forget everything our kindly teachers ever did for us to ensure we made it to third level. Learning is hard, unlearning can be even harder.
It starts like this. In your first week, or perhaps even sooner, you’ll get a book list. In fact, you might not be given one at all, you might have to go and look for it on the department website. So there’s the first difference. Your mum’s not going to head into Easons, drop €500 and hand you a pile of beautifully covered books that contain all you need to know for the year.
Your college book list contains core texts, suggested texts and further reading. Some you will buy, others you will have to hunt down in the library. What many students will do is buy the books they can afford off the core list, pile them up on the desk at home and forget about them for months. As for the suggested reading, well, thanks for the suggestion but there’s a free wine reception at the Film Soc. And so it goes.
After several weeks of avoiding the library and ignoring your reading material, you will make a number of discoveries.
1. You have assignments due in at the end of the term and they require having read quite a lot of material already. You now have to catch up fast.
2. All the books you need to reference in the library are already checked out by other students.
3. In a blind panic, you take your entire month’s allowance and sink it into buying the books you can’t get in the library, swearing to yourself that you will never let this happen again
4. As you pull all-nighters trying to read a semester’s worth of material in three days, you will discover that this stuff is actually really interesting and you wish you had more time to do it properly.
The last point is the most heartbreaking and it is the one you should perhaps have tattooed on the back on your hand. You chose this subject, presumably because you have an interest in it. The people who put the book lists together are very smart and have picked out the best stuff for you. You are almost guaranteed to find it engaging at some level, unless you have picked entirely the wrong subject (in which case wouldn’t it be good to find that out early?). So, little and often and early is a good motto when it comes to studying in college. Begin a love affair with your subject instead of relying on a couple of one-night stands.
