It's Official

The exam time tables in college have gone up. You know what that means, folks? It's officially Study Season! Making a study timetable counts as study, right? Like how gathering notes and buying stationary counts as study?

Seriously, though, I've made myself a study timetable. It's not too tasking. I'm actually planning on using the study weeks we get in college. I've broken it down so I'm studying subjects in order (because of a massive 4-day gap at the end before my final exam...which is Poetry(!)...so I don't need to study that one first in case of exhaustion.) However, I'm not going to study an entire subject in one sitting, or before I move on to the next subject. I'm going to study questions.

Up until the day before an exam, I'll be studying new material. However, the night before (and morning of) an exam, I'll be breaking information down in revision. Admittedly it's all revision of what we were supposed to have been taught in class, but for a lot of the material it's so complex you need to re-do a lot of the work, just to make sure you know it properly. But anyway, I'll be sure to have covered all of the material at least a day before the revision day.

It's tempting to say that because I have Wednesdays off exams, I can go to the comic book shop to get new comics... I'll see... I think what will probably happen is, if I'm going to the college on that day to study, I'll head to the comic book shop for it's opening, then head to college, because that won't cause me to lose a day of study if I were to just go into the city center and head back home. (Does it seem like I'm trying to justify it to myself? I think it sounds like I'm trying to justify it to myself.)

Anyway, ten exams overall, which isn't too bad. It's less than previous years. Still more than the Leaving Certificate, for some bizarre reason, but that's just how things work when you don't have exams at the end of each semester. Overall, though, I think it's been ridiculous. Yes, we have a lot of modules, but when you have teaching placement and at least ten exams per year, as well as essays and other such work that gets handed in weekly, it does seem like they want students to be under stress.

(So yeah... comic books.)

The simple fact of the matter is that over three weeks, I'll have ten exams, six week-days off for study, and three weekends (a total of 22 days, really...let's just say three weeks so it's less daunting.) They will be some of the most stressful weeks of our lives, for the sake of nineteen hours of writing, due to the fact that we're not only required to memorize a ton of material (a lot of it from before Christmas) but also to engage with it meaningfully and intelligently and respond to a specific type of question that will limit what we can say, but cannot prepare for directly (aside from just learning everything.) By the end of the exams, I don't imagine I'll remember much about my first exam (Bioethics... whoop whoop!) which kind of escapes the point of testing whether or not I know it.

This isn't a critique of my college. This is a critique against exams in general. The aim to test how much a student knows based on one sitting, one written exam, is ridiculous, and yet it's still the most widely used form of assessment in educational systems around the world.

Exam season is here, ladies and gentlemen, and with it will come an obscene amount of caffeine, hair-pulling, sleepless nights and (probably) swearing. College is less fun sometimes...

Feedback Forum

The Writers' Soc met today in college, for the first time in way too long. We had to put our Feedback Forums on hold last semester, with most of us - if not all of us - actively involved in what became a triple-header showcase of plays at Christmas. It didn't make sense to try squeeze one more thing into an already busy schedule, not when it required producing work, and not when it usually goes on for about two hours.

It was so good to get to hear a lot of new work from people, with a mix of poetry, short stories, blog posts and letters, written in various emotional and sobreital states.

The Feedback Forum is a good chance for us to get to share our work, but that's not its only purpose. The poems we share - because it's usually poems, but that's not intentional - tell us something of the people who wrote them, and that leads on to various conversations about the meanings behind the work. We ended up talking in length about abortion in Ireland as a result of someone's work. Her first time coming, and that's what happens.

It was awesome.

I shared a single poem, this time, written at the start of the year for a friend whom almost everyone in the society knows. It was a very personal piece, and one I haven't had the chance to share more broadly, yet. All in all, I think it went down well.

The Writers' Soc is due to go on to become part of the first ever English Week in my college. Several societies - Drama, Writers, Tea and Sci-Fi confirmed, from what I know about it - are planning events to fit into the week, to make it known that there are lots of fun ways to share the joy of the English language and its various media. Thankfully I'm not in charge of running the entire thing, or I'd be freaking out right now.

It will be fun, though. We've never had so much to do in the various societies. Drama lasted the longest out of the non-sports socieities last year, with two plays in the second semester drawing in massive crowds - almost selling out twice! That's a lot for a small college. This year, we split up the work a lot over the two semesters, and created something entirely different out of the Drama Society than has been seen in previous years. Just as well; the number of new members jumped up this year, making it the biggest Drama Society I've seen since my first year in the college (possibly the biggest it's been since before that!)

With English Week, Drama is going along with three much younger societies to create something unique to the college. There's such a wide variety of events in the works, and I'm delighted that the Writers' Soc, my baby in the college, gets to be involved in it. We're still planning something massive, but it all focuses on the type of work we do in the Feedback Forum. We're going to get a little bit more public than people are used to seeing us, if they even remember we exist.

I canny wait.

In the meantime, I'm going to take advantage of the poetry-buzz I'm on and work on some new material over the coming week to get as many thoughts as I can out on paper in as best a form as I can manage. The next Feedback Forum is going to rock!