This September, Year 8 welcomed some new faces into its friendly fold; it now has a more transatlantic flavour, with the arrival of our smiley Americans Giovanna and Marta, as well as a touch of British style, thanks to Jonathan’s arrival. That they have settled in so seamlessly and happily is a reflection on their excellent character, and the welcoming atmosphere created by our students. Their presence is great news from a language point of view, because native speakers are so important in the classroom as a support to our non-native tongues.
To welcome our American students, albeit by sheer coincidence, we began the term studying a great American writer: Edgar Allan Poe, more specifically The Murders In The Rue Morgue, which is considered to be the seminal work of detective fiction in the English language. The story introduces the students to Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, a typically quirky detective figure, and his process of ratiocination to solve a serious crime. A ghastly murder is committed in a neighbourhood of Paris, and its crime can only be solved by a logical process of careful reasoning and inference, interpreting evidence in a way that highlights the bumbling incompetence of the police, while our narrator describes it with awe.
If that process sounds familiar, that may be because Poe essentially created the template for most detective fiction that followed, including the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.
In fact, Year 9 are already familiar with the workings of arguably the greatest and most famous detective of them all: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. At present, they are studying The Hound Of The Baskervilles, learning about how tension, anticipation, red herrings, extended metaphors, and characterisation contribute to the effective exposition of detective fiction.
When we studied Poe, our American trio solved the crime before the expositional denouement from M. Dupin. As yet, no one has been able to solve the crime of Sir Charles Baskerville’s death, but there are more clues to be found in the coming chapters…