Notes from a Coma - Suitability Guide for the Comparative Study

Notes from a Coma for the Comparative Study (HL) - Complete Bundle

Everything you need to teach *Notes from a Coma* (Mike McCormack) for the Leaving Cert English Comparative Study, Higher Level: the Student Textbook and the Teacher Guide together. Anthony O'Malley watches his herd destroyed for BSE, travels to an Eastern European orphanage and buys a two-year-old boy for two thousand dollars. JJ grows up in Louisburgh loved and extraordinary, and cannot stop feeling guilty for existing. Years later he volunteers for a European penal experiment in which sentences are served in deep coma aboard a ship anchored in Killary Harbour. The novel is what five people who love or know him say while he is under, with a second, colder narrative running beneath them in footnotes. As a comparative choice it is the sharpest formal contrast available: five testimony voices with no arbiter between them, a protagonist who never speaks, a footnote apparatus, and no chronology at all — set inside concentric rings of power running from a Mayo parish to a European superstate. The bundle covers all four modes: Cultural Context, Literary Genre, Theme or Issue, and General Vision and Viewpoint. Every comparison point is partner-agnostic, so the set works whatever texts you pair the novel with. ### What's included (three PDF files): - **Student Textbook (33 pages):** continuous, exam-ready analysis written for students to read independently. A general introduction and a chapter on approaching the comparative question, then a full chapter on each mode — each opening with a "Reading for this mode" primer and "What the examiners ask", working through close readings of key moments with key-moment and symbol tables, and ending with a sample comparative paragraph (with slots for the student's second text), "Setting this text against others" notes, and a comparison grid in which the *Notes from a Coma* column is already filled in and the Text 2 and Text 3 columns are left blank. Eight original, SEC-style practice questions, two per mode, close the book. Licensed for the purchasing teacher to copy for their own students. - **Teacher Guide (24 pages):** the preparation done for you. A frank before-you-teach briefing on sensitive content and practical notes; the novel for the teacher (story and structure, voices and figures, the world of the novel, themes read broadly, how the novel is told, and the outlook); a key-moments bank and a quotation and reference bank, every entry referenced by speaker and section; all four modes broken down (what examiners reward, where the novel is strong, what to teach, the errors to pre-empt, a strongest-answer line); a workable teaching sequence and the misreadings to pre-empt; notes on running the textbook's grids, sample paragraphs, mode primers and practice questions; partner-agnostic coupling guidance; assessment essentials (PCLM as percentages, the PEAL paragraph shape, what lifts an answer, timing); and question-angle banks drawn from recent SEC papers. - **Text Suitability Guide** (2 pages, free): the at-a-glance overview: synopsis, themes, sensitive content, and the collection’s strengths in the comparison modes at both Higher and Ordinary Level. ## Written by a practising teacher. Buy the bundle and save on the separate prices.