Why do we still think the Leaving Cert is the be all and end all?

A friend’s daughter got 530 points in her Leaving Cert last week. I thought the feeling in their house would be one of absolute elation, but he said, to be honest, it was mostly just one of quiet relief.
I hope that relief is being experienced in other homes. 61,000 students got their results last week. That’s 61,000 boys and girls coming to terms with varying indications of what the future may hold. Some elated, some not. It’s no wonder it still gives us nightmares.
But 530 points is some result. It put me in mind of a term from physics, that of maximum potential energy. That is when the energy of an object — or a teenager — is, due to its position, properties and the forces acting on it, at its maximum value.
Yes, it does get a bit more downhill from here, the energy becomes kinetic, it gets a bit more slap, bam, wallop and unpredictable. The ski slope of life beckons and who knows where it will lead?
But, right now, regardless of the result, it is time to raise a glass and sing along with Van Morrison’s Coney Island: “Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?”
This will be harder to do in some homes. For some, results will have come that, with the best will in the world, are not what was expected. Shoulders are dropping, eyes misting. That horrible feeling of “now what?” is taking hold.
Hence it is a tradition at this time of the year for media to carry stories of the “I got poor results but look at me now” variety. Some of these will mention RTE celebrities (no comment needed) and others the go-to boys of “left school with very little qualifications” Harry Styles and Albert Einstein.
I’m not sure how useful these are. Will a disappointed teen, already awash with insecurities, really take heart from a man who quite obviously won the DNA lottery? Can a child who failed maths take heart from a man who later invented relativity? I think not.
More useful are the tales of people who ended up doing things they hardly knew existed when their first CAO required filling in. Like JP McMahon, who wanted to be a playwright and studied art history and English in Galway before opening the Michelin-starred Aniar restaurant.
“Life is the best teacher” he once said and amen to that.
For my part I had wanted to do engineering, but my first Leaving Cert didn’t deliver the points. I was devastated but got a job and repeated at nighttime. Those were dark days, brightened mostly, at the time, by the music of David Bowie. If it hadn’t been for Heroes …
I recalled those days recently as I settled in to interview a bestselling author at a music festival. A little bit of preliminary research revealed that apart from her 35 million book sales she also has a law degree. It, like my engineering degree, is presumably gathering dust in a drawer somewhere.
My curiosity was piqued. “Why did you do law?” I asked. “I had the points,” she told me. And that was the end of that.
But there was more. How could an author whose first book was an instant success and who had been given a book deal on the basis of two chapters of that book, have gone through a secondary education in Ireland without someone noticing the potential talent?
“All that time in school, doing essays, projects, assignments, the odd 1,000 words on the poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins, the Three Best Things About the Rising, etc, did no one ever say, ‘You’re very good at the auld words?’”
“No,” she said, “No one noticed.”
You’re probably wondering who the bestselling author is? The bestselling author whose portrait hangs in the National Gallery, who was the winner of three Irish Book Awards and whose books are available in every known language including Klingon? But no, I won’t say.
As Al Pacino once said to me: “Never name drop, Tom, never name drop.”
For those who got results this week I salute you. Just taking the Leaving Cert is terrifying and character forming at the same time. But what happens next is still all to play for. Clichés abound — it’s a marathon, not a sprint, etc — but it is all to be enjoyed and savoured.
And that moment, of maximum potential energy, is the sweetest of all.