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. Not sure whether to select *Notes from a Coma* as one of your comparative texts? Download the free Text Suitability Guide on its own — it tells you everything you need to decide. ### What's included (two 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. The comparison grid rows are identical across every Prescribed Shelf comparative Student Textbook, so if your other texts are covered too, the books line up row by row for your exact text combination. Written by a practising teacher. Buy the bundle and save on the separate prices.