Maria over at Crooked Timber writes about her recurring dream: having to sit the Leaving Cert again. It's more properly called a nightmare, particularly because she's faced with the dreaded Honours Maths exam.
Judging by the rest of Maria's entry, girls really did have it worse than boys. She compares herself to the Magdalene Sisters and it's only a little over the top.
As for the Maths, the link she gives shows the worst of it: integration. The questions on the paper were a form of intimidation through minimalism. Integrate this.
On the the other Leaving Cert subjects , they deliberately left calculus out of the curriculum, which made physics (in particular) and economics easy. (One exception I remember: there was an easy proof of Gauss's Law you could use that involved just a smidgen of calculus.) The Leaving Cert is one where choosing which questions to answer is among the most important skills. The strategy for physics and (especially) economics was to do the most mathematical questions. That way you eliminated as much subjectivity in the marking as possible: if you got the right answer you'd get 100% of possible marks. Essay questions always carried the risk that an examiner might not like your style of writing.
That risk applied for me even in subjects that had no mathematical content. I don't think I wrote one essay for English in my last two years of school. I got a D in the exam. I suppose it's only fair, but that result is the only one that bothers me.
On the subject of Magdalene Sisters...
I went to a boarding school. Our laundry was done at a convent.
I now know that means it was probably done by fallen women
who were
shunted into that occupation for having children out of wedlock.
As their punishment they were washing the soiled clothes and bedclothes of hormone-addled teenage boys.
There was worse. Ann Lovett died twenty years ago while giving birth alone in a grotto Co. Longford. She was fifteen. To this day no one knows who the father was or how it could have happened.
And yet a generation of us made it past the Leaving Cert. We grew up and in some ways the whole country grew up. Surely there can never be another referendum like the one in 1983 again. But is it any wonder that people have uneasy dreams about the period.