Have you got a Leaving Cert student in the house? If you find you’re walking on eggshells, you’re not alone. Follow these tips – we may or may not be speaking from experience …
1 Try not to react when your son is playing FIFA on the Xbox until 1am the night before his French exam. He’s changed the language settings, so it’s actually revision. When sport comes up on the paper the next day, he knows all the vocab, thanks to online gaming …
2 Don’t bang on about eating healthily, proffering bananas at every turn, or drinking lots of water to aid concentration. They want Monster and Redbull, and endless supplies of frozen pizza.
3 Don’t burden your student with your own exam stories. They don’t care that your fountain pen broke in your English exam. They don’t know what a fountain pen is. They don’t want to hear your King Lear quotes, either.
4 Remember, no one learns English poetry quotes anymore – or is that just your child who doesn’t?
5 Turn a blind eye to the bedroom floor until the exams are over. You feel it in your bones there is a half-full carton of protein milk in one of those fetid backpacks. Resist.
6 Do not change the student’s bedlinen during this period. This could have a destabilising effect. Everything must remain exactly as they left it in the morning.
7 Avoid the urge to compare their work levels/results to their siblings/cousins/neighbour’s child. It doesn’t help. Listen to archive Desert Island Discs – the most successful people did not ace their final exams.
8 Try not to leap out of bed when you hear them rummaging for a midnight snack – you can’t sleep a wink these last two weeks – they need some alone time, staring glassily at a Fulfil bar and marshmallows melting in a mug in the microwave.
9 Do not suggest they wear a coat on chillier mornings. The Leaving Cert has its own microclimate.
10 Do not ask where the other three Casio calculators have got to. Just go to Tesco.
11 Never suggest they put antiseptic cream on their spots during the Leaving Cert.