Everything you need to teach The Spinning Heart for the Leaving Cert English Comparative Study (Higher Level) in one download: the Student Textbook your class reads from, the Teacher Guide you prepare from, and the free Text Suitability Guide alongside them.

Pokey Burke’s building firm has gone under and Pokey has gone abroad, leaving his men with no redundancy and no stamps: he pocketed the deductions. His foreman Bobby Mahon, the village’s quiet hurling hero, is left to carry it. Then Bobby’s father is beaten to death in his cottage and Bobby is charged, and in the same weeks a toddler is taken from a half-empty ghost estate. Twenty-one villagers speak in turn, one chapter each, and only the reader ever assembles the truth. As a comparative choice it gives you post-crash rural Ireland with its machinery written down — stamps, subcontracts, mortgages, rates — and a formal contrast almost nothing else on the list can match: twenty-one narrators with no arbiter between them, one of them dead, and a confession delivered to the reader alone. The bundle covers all four Higher Level modes (Cultural Context, Literary Genre, Theme or Issue, and General Vision and Viewpoint), and 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 (30 pages): the novel analysed in continuous prose students can read independently. Each mode chapter opens with a “Reading for this mode” primer and “What the examiners ask”, works through the novel’s key moments with close readings and key-moment tables, and closes with a sample comparative paragraph the student completes with their second text, “Setting this text against others” notes, and a comparison grid: the The Spinning Heart column filled in, the Text 2 and Text 3 columns left for their own combination. Eight original, SEC-style practice questions, two per mode, end the book. References are given by speaker rather than by page, so they hold whatever edition your class is using. Licensed for the purchasing teacher to copy for their own students.
• Teacher Guide (25 pages): your preparation, done. A full sensitive-content briefing keyed to the speaker whose chapter carries each passage, with practical notes; the novel read for the teacher, from story and structure to the outlook; a key-moments bank and a quotation and reference bank of sixteen quotations, every one attributed to its speaker; each mode broken down into what examiners reward, where the novel is strong, what to teach and the errors to pre-empt; a workable teaching sequence built for twenty-one narrators; notes on running the textbook’s grids, sample paragraphs and practice questions in class; coupling guidance for choosing partner texts; assessment essentials (PCLM marking, the PEAL paragraph shape, 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 novel’s strengths in the comparison modes at both Higher and Ordinary Level.

The comparison grid rows are identical across every Prescribed Shelf comparative Student Textbook, so if your other texts are covered too, the three books line up row by row for your exact text combination.

Buy the bundle and save on the separate prices. Written by a practising teacher.