What an old Leaving Cert poetry book taught me about thinking

My Soundings, the Leaving Certificate poetry textbook used from 1969 until 2000, has long been lost to time, but my wife’s – probably purchased in The Shelf bookshop on the quays in Cork – sits safely preserved in our little family library upstairs.

Bought for £2.50, the interior pages contain copious pencil notes. There are paragraphs and paragraphs of carefully written, still perfectly legible, notes from the first page on. Inevitably, the book also contains her sisters’ names, as it was handed down from one to the next, as well as those of various boys the three women were possibly interested in at the time.

Battered and venerable, the artefact harks back to a time before books of notes became the norm. Whereas now each student gets a few pages of notes on each poem in their textbook, the Soundings poems were followed by up to seven questions, and that’s it. The back of the book had short biographies and the odd word explained, but there were no notes analysing the meaning or language of the poems. This was up to the student and the teacher.

Kavanagh’s Inniskeen Road: July Evening is a perfect example. It has six questions after the poem. Question number five asks the students to: “Show how the poem combines features of the Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnet.”

A quick flip through the musty pages to the back of the book, carefully so that it doesn’t fall apart or lose more wallpaper, reveals that the only notes on the poem are an explanation of who Alexander Selkirk was. Nothing else. No explanation of a sonnet, Shakespearean or otherwise. To write this answer, my wife, her sisters and me had to rely on our own knowledge or that of the teacher in front of us. We had to know the different sonnets and think carefully before answering the last part of the question: “Do you consider that the thought is successfully completed within the framework?”

We were forced to think for ourselves; there were no other options.

What about students these days?

Well, some things haven’t changed. They still go through the poem with the teacher, they still have to think about the question, but they can also go through the notes in the book and can go online and look at various websites. They can check their TikTok accounts, search YouTube or buy extra notes from a teacher on Instagram. They can use AI.

They have so many more options than I or my wife had back in the, well, it’d be rude to put an age on my wife, so let’s say “back then”.

Students are no longer inhibited by the knowledge within the classroom or the books available in the local library. There’s so much more information available to them.

The downside?

There is so much more information available to them. All the time.

Watching a video on the poetry of Emily Dickinson (the only woman poet in Soundings) results in the social media algorithm throwing more videos of the poet on to your timeline.

This is overwhelming for students. Whereas before we could close our books and turn on Inspector Morse, now students close their books, go on social media, and there’s Emily Dickinson again. The reclusive poet is everywhere.

These clips rarely agree with each other. Being different is their selling point.

Often they are simply wrong.

I have appeared on these sites, to the amusement of my students, but have tried to counterbalance others’ nonsense.

If a student were asked those Kavanagh questions today, most would get the sonnet information from a notes site or YouTube but then turn to some influencer on TikTok or Instagram, or ask AI. They’ll do this as a natural next step. Trusting their own critical thinking may not happen at all.

Recently, I’ve been getting wonderful essays ruined by random, odd, offbeat sentences full of incorrect information. AI, fuelled by these dubious online “experts”, has entered the essay.

This year, for the first time, students asked me to teach a particular poet. My initial reaction was to get excited at their enthusiasm for poetry. I can be so naive. No, they hadn’t been reading the other poets; an influencer said the poet would come up. I obliged them, and we studied the poet. Doing so eased their minds and allowed me, not Instagram, to guide them.

Predicting poets for the Leaving Cert is a charlatan’s game, someone looking for clicks and likes.

Why do students listen to influencers selling their wares? Because the Leaving Cert is a competition pitting student against student to get the most CAO points to “buy” their third level course in a system not unlike the dynamic pricing used to sell concert tickets. Students, afraid of being wrong, look to their screens and parents’ credit cards for any help they can get.

Students are exhausted by these clips. Each clip promising more advice, more notes, more insights than the last.

The result?

Students who lack the confidence to think through a text or issue, students full of doubt.