teaching | the m0vie blog

343. Rosie – Leaving Cert 2023 (#—)

Posted on September 3, 2023 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn, Darren Mooney and Conor Murphy, The 250 is a weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released Saturdays at 6pm GMT.

This September, we are kicking off a season looking at the films on the Irish Leaving Cert English Curriculum. So this week, Paddy Breathnach’s Rosie.

Over the course of two days, an Irish family struggles to survive amid the nation’s ongoing homeless crisis. With the help of her husband John Paul, Rosie desperately tries to hold her family together as the situation grows increasingly dire.

At time of recording, it was not ranked on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

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Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: curriculum, education, exam, film, homelessness, Ireland, irish cinema, leaving cert, leaving cert english, leaving certificate, moe dunford, paddy breathnach, podcast, Roddy Doyle, rosie, Sarah Greene, School, teaching, The 250 | Leave a comment »

Film Studies in the Leaving Certificate…

Posted on September 7, 2009 by Darren

I sat the Leaving Certificate over five years ago, so the memory of the examine is still fresh in my mind. For those international readers, that’s the exam we do at the end of secondary school before we go to college (it determines whether we get a place as we don’t really have college fees… yet). Anyway, no subject perplexed me as much as English did. here was a subject that could be interesting and compelling, but mostly ended up boring the pants off anyone sitting it. The subject is taught over two years with students choosing one core text (taken for a set list by the Department) and then three ‘comparative texts’ (also from a list, albeit a larger one). There were also poets and composition and all the stuff we would expect. I remember being excited when I heard that films were on this comparative list. But that soon changed when I learned which films. With all the kids going back to school, I wonder if film studies should be made a larger part of English studies, or if we simply need to revise which films we use and how we use them in the class room.