First Of The Year

Yr 8 History, E5

My first class for the year and there’s only been about a week of school. Just as I start them off decorating the front cover of their workbooks, a teacher comes in with a class set of books. She tells them their regular teacher will be away for a while. With my permission, she then goes through the syllabus and introduces today’s lesson, which is on The Dark Ages. She leaves, and I hand out the books and sit back as they work quietly.

They’re a typical start of the year junior class: prepared to knuckle down and behave themselves, eager to learn. This is, of course, as good as it ever gets in a school. It can only go downhill from here.

With time on my hands I write out my first list of the year:

10 Literary Themed Pop Songs (and their references)

- Lucy’s Eyes, The Clouds (Wordsworth)
- End of The Night, The Doors (William Blake)
- Calypso, Suzanne Vega (Homer)
- Wuthering Heights, Kate Bush (Emily Bronte)
- The Sensual World, Kate Bush (James Joyce)
- Summertime In England, Van Morrison (Coleridge, Blake, Joyce, Wordsworth, etc)
- Don’t Stand So Close To Me, The Police (a very brief mention of Nabokov!)
- Hey Jack Kerouac, 10,000 Maniacs (Kerouac, Ginsberg, William Burroughs)
- You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go, Bob Dylan (Rimbaud, Verlaine)

- Dover Beach, The Bangles (TS Eliot)

I came up with this because I seem to have encountered some of these songs lately. 

Meanwhile, a couple of boys in the class are niggling each other. After a warning, I move one of them to the front. He complies meekly. See - discipline’s already getting out of hand!