Colleges are full of Langers

18th Jun 2004

 

Colleges are full of Langers

All around town at the moment are the miserable faces of secondary school kids wearily trudging through June's draining humidity towards their respective exam halls. While some of their friends, brothers and sisters are on their summer holidays, heading for the beach every day or balling down to Youghal or West Cork the leaving certs still have three painful weeks left before the shackles are finally removed.

Some dose: loadsa heads doin' the leavin'

There's a certain wry smile on the face of every leaving cert veteran on seeing the school jumpers still patrolling Pana in mid- June. Now years later we still take immense satisfaction that the most ludicrously over-hyped high pressure year of their life is now well and truly behind us.

The leaving cert students' wizened pale complexions show that they have aged about three years in the last nine months since sixth year began. Wrinkles, spots, baggy eyes, scraggy hair, humped up shoulders, overflowing ear wax and yellow teeth are a result of endless hours bent over text books - using every spare minute they have trying to memorise some nonsense written by some English langer with a quill four hundred years ago.

Look at it: custom built for langers

The tiresome rhetoric from teachers and parents about the consequences of not achieving results that are..unachievable programs the misfortunate student to spend every spare minute filling his/her head with semi-useless information.

Wouldn't it be handy if we didn't have to spend so much time learning any of this stuff? With all the advances in bio-technology surely one of the bright sparks out there can come up with a brain-to-USB interconnector cable that we could use to download stuff into students' brains from computers?

Unfortunately despite the noble efforts of the majority of students not everyone is committed to ensuring Cork maintains its status as the hub of high achievers in the leaving:

The "Don't Cares" !

There will always be those who have been too lazy to get off their own arse all year. When the reality of the exams comes thundering home many employ the false don't-care attitude. Discrediting the leaving cert as "a waste of time" and repeatedly stating that they couldn't give a toss about exams makes the fact that they are as thick as the ditch less uncomfortable.

When they receive the results in August they will loudly announce their five E's and two F's with a laugh making some predictable joke about the number of E's they got and their tendency to dabble with drugs of the same name. Double hard indeed!

They always maintain the line that "going ta college is for langers" or the slight variation that "college is full of langers" and that they'd prefer to be earnin' grade to buy their first spoiler enhanced hooch wagon instead of "lampin' at stupid books".

If they're happy on the minimum wage working ten hours a day building with their uncle, the slave driver, with little or no social life then that's their prerogative. They wouldn't want to be associated with all those langers in college.doing all that learning and stuff.

CIT looks like there'd be
loadsa langers there

If you're interested in becoming a psychologically unstable 'Don't Care' follow these steps.
To achieve this status a very visible and casual approach must be taken to exams:

1. Always take an ordinary level exam instead of an honours one where possible. You're going to have to fail it anyway so might as well take the easiest route.

2. Be at least ten minutes late - make as much noise as you can entering the hall.

3. Take off your tracka top and excess jewellery and unload your pencil case really slowly to make it clear that you won't be tearing into the paper to make up for lost time. Feel free to spill plenty of pens onto the ground irritating everyone around you.

4. Do a quick bit of messing before you sit down - move your chair around so the legs make a lot of noise on the ground attracting a lot attention to yourself. Have a big beaming smile ready so your fellow students will be "impressed" at how good humoured you are before such an important and difficult exam.

5. Take plenty of toilet and cigarette breaks. Breaking your pen and spilling ink on yourself is a good excuse to get a few more minutes away from the geeks.

6. Make sure you're the first to leave the exam. A good 40 minutes is sufficient. Pretend you're leaving to meet some of your biys for a game of pool. Everyone will think you don't give a toss.

7. If you meet one of your classmates afterwards be jovial about how little you did. "I only wrote half a page for the essay and I didn't even bother with the poetry". Some laugh you biy!


The geeks out there strangely follow the don't-cares strategy to an extent. A lot of covering up has to be done - you have to pretend not to care too. Behind the scenes the geeks have been studying 16 hours/day for the last six months before the leaving cert.

On the bus in and out of school they look like any other teenager: head down; thumbs ruthlessly tapping away at the mobile phone. While you might expect them to be texting friends about their chances of a score at the weekend they are actually texting maths formulae and Shakespeare quotes to each other on their mobiles unbeknown to their fellow passengers.

All the study and hard work is for a good cause though. Each year Cork receives the highest leaving cert results in the country (if you didn't known its unlikely this will surprise you of course) so get out and do your duty for your county..best of luck from the PRC and don't let them catch ye coggin'.