Active discussions

Meet the Other Phone. A phone that grows with your child.

Meet the Other Phone.
A phone that grows with your child.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

Talk
Chat

Join the discussion and chat with other Mumsnetters about everyday life, relationships and parenting.

Original poster

calling Year 11 English Lit: An Inspector Calls: I think the Inspector Did It

151 replies

Waterparc · 23/10/2018 10:40

please help. DS1 has to study An Inspector Calls. He was doing a question on the ending and we have just realised that Eva was killed by the Inspector who then prepped the other characters to confess in order to have the perfect defence.

is there a better explanation?

OP posts:
youarenotkiddingme · 23/10/2018 20:42

He did of mice and men in yr 9.

I did AF. OMAM and Macbeth in secondary - possibly all for my GCSE's?

I also remember the demon headmaster and joke my local secondary academy is the RL version!

Ds is also doing a Christmas carol!

BigStripeyBastard · 23/10/2018 20:46

SilentIsla, yes, I get that. But could we not have had just one that didnt leave half the class clinically depressed? They should have just shown us fucking Threads, Schindler's List and bloody Watership Down, just to make sure we were thoroughly miserable.

As a cheerful distraction, we did get the poems of Wilfred Owen, just to lighten the mood. We lived in North Wales. It rained constantly and the only thing that obliterated the slate heaps that lay all around us was the omnipresent thick fog! We had yearly reminders of the Aberfan disaster, just in case we forgot that the afore mentioned slag heaps could wipe us all out at any moment...... WE WERE MISERABLE ENOUGH!

bbcessex · 23/10/2018 20:47

Of Mice & Men was a brilliant read. Still remember that.

Interested in this thread?

Then you might like threads about these subjects:

General education Secondary education
tobee · 23/10/2018 20:49

They always get students to do incredibly miserable stuff. However, we did The Importance of Being Earnest at A level and apart from saying "that's an epigram" or "that's a paradox" there wasn't a heck of a lot else to say.

We did Tess of the D'Urbervilles too. I thought it was a massive, great long snore fest.

Oblomov18 · 23/10/2018 20:56

Ds1 is studying this.
Inspector calls is a very hard book to study. I was shocked it was chosen.

Pieceofpurplesky · 23/10/2018 20:57

The new English curriculum is restrictive. I would say the majority of my pupils enjoy AIC. The social responsibility and class divides are more prevalent today than the last few years. It opens up dialogue about food banks, poverty and responsibility. Many of my pupils live with these and totally 'get' the play. It helps that half the cast are in Peaky Blinders in the modern film.

Pupils also loved Of Mice and Men so we now do it in Year 9. A Christmas Carol is the novel we study - keeping it simple as they have to remember 15 poems.

Oblomov18 · 23/10/2018 20:57

Thunder:
"
Easier to get a higher mark with Priestley anyhow"

Please, what do you mean?

CarryOnScreamingValenta · 23/10/2018 21:00

I studied this for GCSE in the 80s. Surprised it's still on the syllabus. I enjoyed it at the time.

Madein1995 · 23/10/2018 21:36

I really enjoyed An Inspector Calls in English. English was my favourite subject and perhaps I was naive (back in 2009/2010 - year 8 I think it was) but the while mystery and death thing made it interesting. Struggling to think of when it was now. Definitely before yr 10 as the classes were mixed gender for GCSE

ThunderInMyHeart · 23/10/2018 22:19

@Oblomov18 - because it’s an easy text. It’s as subtle as the Victorian novel is verbose, and as simplistic to boot.

PerspicaciaTick · 23/10/2018 22:27

DD is doing An Inspector Calls AND Pride and Prejudice.

I had to study the load of abusive toss that is Of Mice and Men. I loathed that book deeply. Far from the Madding Crowd was much better - mostly because we just watched the film on repeat in lessons as the teacher was keen on Terence Stamp (I have grown to share her appreciation).

LanaorAna2 · 23/10/2018 22:29

13 Reasons Why goes Edwardian.

I love love love AIC. Priestley is underrated.

theduchessstill · 23/10/2018 22:29

I really enjoy teaching it and agree that the majority of pupils get it and the fact that the inspector and Eva are no than devices makes it easy for them to talk about the writer's methods.

I did have a student one year insisting that the inspector had been Eva's pimp and had killed her. That was irritating. Why does the inspector make the speech about the millions of Johns and Evas if he killed her?

I'll never have Lord of the Flies taught in my department - there are no girls in it. Set 3 last year had loads of great discussions over who was the worst out of Eric and Gerald.

MsJaneAusten · 23/10/2018 22:33

For the love of all that is holy, could we not have read something bloody cheerful? Just once? Just one book where nobody dies after a miserable existence?

Hahaha. My Year 11s have renamed it GCSE Death Studies. They’ve stopped asking ‘what are we doing today?’ and started asking ‘who’s dying today?’

PerspicaciaTick · 23/10/2018 22:36

At the age of 12, we had to read/act a play in class over a series of lessons. It was about a school trip to a nuclear bunker...then a nuclear bomb hit during the visit and only the children survived, and it went a bit Lord of the Flies and someone ended up pregnant and carrying the future of the human race. It was very grim, especially as we all thought we were about to descend into nuclear war in RL.
Does anyone else remember this gem?

PrincessOnTheInternet · 23/10/2018 22:40

I did AIC at GCSE in 2013 - yr10, alongside OMAM (love it) and Heroes (love) - found AIC so dryyyyy BUT for me easy to analyse!
Agree with PPs EVERY book I've read in an English class from secondary right through my A-Levels has been thoroughly miserable and surrounding those ever so cheery topics of:
PTSD
Rape
Death
Domestic Abuse or child abuse
Sometimes a combination of all five Confused - did also inquire as to whether we could study something a bit more cheerful, now that I'm at university I can't decide whether it's gotten better or worse!

TheSageofOnions · 23/10/2018 22:43

Well, whatever happened in AIC it did the Birlings no long term harm as their grandson still had enough cash left to fly MJN Air every year to the rugby.

Devilishpyjamas · 23/10/2018 22:53

It has a special place in our family. Ds2 was small boy in the Daldry production. His first taste of professional theatre and he loved it and ended up doing lots more. I think I preferred the Daldry play to the TV version of a few years ago.

mysteryfairy · 23/10/2018 23:05

We have had this as a gcse text 3 times across our 3 DC 😩 When I took DS2 to see The National production he fell asleep and snored audibly through most of it.

Only DD got the full Gove-ified syllabus - I was praying for the Austen but she got Christmas Carol. They had to read it when it was not even Christmas 😦 We did see it at the Young Vic though and it was a brilliant production. I see it's on in every second theatre this Xmas for anyone with an unfortunate Y10/11 student.

I'm not a huge Steinbeck fan and productions of Of Mice and Men truly horrify as they generally include English actors murdering Californian accents. So maybe the disappearance of American literature from the GCSE syllabus is the illustrious something to thank Gove for!?

I have an English literature degree and the texts I studied at GCSE and A level have stayed with me like nothing else I have ever read, even including the texts from my dissertation. So sad now that our DC have such a small and pedestrian selection inflicted on them at breakneck pace and that the main driver for selecting the nineteenth century novel seems to be brevity. All three of my DC who were huge readers from being tiny dropped English Literature with huge relief and are incredulous that I chose to carry it on.

SilentIsla · 23/10/2018 23:23

PerspicaciaTick

It was Adam’s Ark!!

LarryFreakinStylinson · 24/10/2018 00:13

I’m trying to think now what other texts we did. We did the Go Between. I HATED that book. I thought the main character needed to stop moaning and get over ‘it’. Oh and Silas Marner.

Miserable. AIC was the best of a bad lot!!

PerspicaciaTick · 24/10/2018 00:22

Thank you SilentIsla, that has been bugging me for years. I had successfully blocked the whole euthanising Tom storyline and all of the adults (which I suspect may be because they were all played by my class mates). It is even grimmer than I remembered.

HelenaDove · 24/10/2018 00:59

"I'll never have Lord of the Flies taught in my department - there are no girls in it."

I had to study it when i was at school and this was one of the reasons why i hated it.

IHeartKingThistle · 24/10/2018 01:17

I'm a secondary English teacher and more than ever I feel that yes, the texts are relentlessly negative. I have a huge top set in Year 10 which has 27 girls and 3 boys (I know!). They are clever, talented, creative... and so, so unhappy. Their self-esteem is non-existent. I want to read lovely things with them.

I miss teaching Mockingbird. I miss seeing the impact it has on kids. I know it's not all sunshine and glitter either but it has something so uplifting and inspiring at the heart of it that you feel like it's doing them good. It feels like you're feeding them vitamins.

I do like AIC though. Anything with 'be more nice' as its moral is OK with me 

IHeartKingThistle · 24/10/2018 01:22

Oh, just realised I didn't comment on the actual OP; how terribly rude of me!

Batshit theory OP.