Week one is done and dusted for the 146,553 young men and women sitting the Leaving Certificate, Leaving Cert Applied or Junior Cycle exams this month. Okay, it was a short week, but it probably didn’t feel like that for anyone sitting the tests. Now, there’s a short break. Relax.Breath. Well done on making it this far. We’ll have reviews of the Leaving Cert papers next week of course. If you want to read any of the reviews of the papers to date, see here: Maths paper oneGeographyEnglish paper oneEnglish paper twoHome Economics, Scientific and SocialIt’s worth noting, of course, that these reviews are initial takes by a few experts. There will always be others – students and teachers – who will have a far different view on the fairness of a particular paper. For example, while the overall impression of Maths paper one was positive, Eoghan O’Leary, a teacher at Kinsale Community College in Cork, said that “many students found the level of interpretation, problem-solving and mathematical reasoning required to be demanding”.In The Irish Times, we finished the week with more voices from impressive students.One is 17-year-old Momin Bari, from Dublin, who is the first in his family to sit the Leaving Cert. “My dad didn’t go to college,” he told us. “He wants me to live the college life that he couldn’t do when he was younger.”And, finally, imagine opening an exam paper to find a poem written by your mother. That happened this week when Lee Davison, a Junior Cycle pupil at Coláiste Éinde in Salthill, Co Galway, sat down to tackle the higher-level English examination paper.Emily Cullen, a poet in residence at the University of Limerick, collected her son from school after the exam. “He said, ‘Mam, it went great. You won’t believe it, but the poem you wrote about me came up. The one about the chalk’. It was just a surreal moment, priceless really.”Have a good weekend, and we’ll be back soon with more news, advice, tips and interviews for students, parents and teachers.