OUR ELDEST IS finishing Transition Year this week and the end cannot come quickly enough. As we close it out, I am thinking of this time last year, when she was up to her eyeballs sitting the Junior Cert.

She was studying for hours every day, and we had to prise her away from the books. I couldn’t wait for her to start Transition Year, to have a break from the serious exam worry and take her foot off the pedal for a year.

Well, do I have an exciting update for that version of myself! Not only did her foot come off the pedal, but the car is also actually in reverse at this stage. Or free-falling. The car fell off a cliff and is now a fiery ball of… you get the idea.

I didn’t do Transition Year. It wasn’t an option in my school; you just jumped from 3rd to 5th. I was 17 sitting the Leaving Cert and while I didn’t really think anything of it at the time I have only ever heard great things about TY, and how the extra year of development really helps when it comes to the Leaving Cert exams. So for us, it was definitely a no-brainer, she was doing TY.

She had studied consistently throughout third year and was more than a little burnt out by the end of the exams. And it was great in that sense to look forward to a year that wasn’t going to be as academically rigid.

In hindsight, the 10 weeks of summer holidays was probably enough to fix this. I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem that couldn’t be solved with 10 weeks off.

From very early on in the school term, she was complaining that she was bored, and I, in what can only be described as catastrophic optimism, told her that boredom was good. Boredom allowed her brain space to grow! As a former teenager myself, I should have known that a bored 16-year-old is actually the stuff of nightmares because they are now a trouble-seeking missile.

It also led to a complete drop in motivation for her across almost all areas of her life. She went from........

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