The Millennium will happen in many ways: spectacularly, colourfully, drunkenly. But there are quieter, more enriching millennium events than crawling beneath the duvet. One of these, and more long-lasting, is the new English Syllabus for all Leaving Cert students which will begin next September, to be examined for the first time in 2001.
The new syllabus will have many new texts, wide choices and new approaches. And reading now not only means the written word but, in that once-catchy phrase, reading film. The teaching of language has also been modified and sharpened with emphasis on the language of Argument, Persuasion, Narration, Information and the Aesthetic use of Language.
In all, we are in for a marvellous sea-change. The 60,000 and more who will sit an English exam in June, 2001, will have studied some brand new territory in a brand new way.
The new course has been many years in the making. Through the 1990s, committees read and sat and discussed and disagreed. There was the hoo-hah when it was thought that Roddy Doyle might be a prescribed text - he's not. There was Niamh Bhreathnach's insistence that Shakespeare remain compulsory at higher level.
But now the new course is all decided upon; the teachers of English have been "in-serviced" and English classrooms next September should sing with newness and excitement.
The newness can be found in novels such as Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing, David Malouf's Fly Away Peter. It can be found in non-fiction such as Jung Chang's Wild Swans, Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia or Brian Keenan's An Evil Cradling and in Frank McGuinness's play Someone Who'll Watch Over Me.
These can be read alongside films such as Cinema Paradiso, A Room With A View, The Third Man, Dances With Wolves or My Left Foot.
The old Leaving Cert had many dead white males, some 19th century women novelists, one woman poet, three living dramatists, one living poet. Now many of the writers studied and discussed in school can be seen on television, visited on websites, heard reading from their work in the local library or bookshop. The directors' movies can be borrowed from the video-shop. And the great works from earlier centuries are on offer too: Antigone, Hamlet, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, King Lear.
As in the past, texts are studied on their own and in depth. But there is also a comparative question which allows the student to study three texts - these can be a combination of play, novel, film, memoir, travel writing - under such headings as The Cultural Context, Hero, Heroine, Villain or Social Setting.
Leaving Cert students will now be invited to read a wide variety of poems on topics that never appeared in the old days: dyeing one's hair, a filling station, the May 1974 Dublin bombings, the massacre of ten Protestants in the North, a secretary longing to escape the trudge and drudge of office tedium.
There's Seamus Heaney's startlingly original marriage poem in which he compares his wife to a skunk, Elizabeth Bishop's description of Brazil, Paul Durcan's evocative account of his five-year-old self going home to Mayo with his father and Eavan Boland's The Pomegranate where she watches her 17-year-old daughter:
It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke.
But Keats and Emily Dickinson are there too. Some of the poems are immediately accessible - Fleur Adcock's For Heidi with Blue Hair is, perhaps, very 20th century. Shakepeare's complex and rewarding sonnets are there too.
And, over the coming years, new poets will be introduced. Adrienne Rich, Derek Walcott, Paula Meehan, Carol Ann Duffy, W.B. Yeats, Derek Mahon, Kerry Hardie, Wordsworth, Hopkins, Kavanagh, Donne, Brendan Kennelly, Denise Levertov and dozens more will come on board in a series of revolving lists.
Another new and exciting dimension to the new course is the Unseen Poem. There are poems on the DART and on New York's Subway, poems in The Irish Times on Saturdays and poems on milk cartons, so there's no excuse for students not being aware of poetry beyond the classroom. One teacher at the in-service training I attended, and perhaps there are others, admitted that he wouldn't be teaching one of the prescribed poems on the new syllabus. In his poem Wounds, Michael Longley tells of how his father told him that as a 17-year-old and a member of the Ulster Division of the Somme he went into battle shouting "Fuck the Pope!" .
"Going over the top with `Fuck the Pope!/ No Surrender!': a boy about to die,/ Screaming `Give 'em one for the Shankill!'/ `Wilder than Gurkhas' were my father's words/ Of admiration and bewilderment."
There was a time when poetry did not admit to such language and this teacher felt that in his school such a powerful sectarian outburst, albeit within a poem, would provoke outrage among parents. The Dublin branch of the Association of Teachers of English will address the shape of things to come in this year's Summer School at the Dublin's Writers Museum opening on Monday.
Kate Bateman, a well-known teacher at Stratford College and the inventive and indefatigable PR dynamo of ATE, promises a rich and varied programme. And it's not only for teachers of English - others can attend.
Shiny new texts and new ideas should ensure that the teaching of English into the future will, in Elizabeth Bishop's words, be "Rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!"
Niall MacMonagle teaches English at Wesley College and edited Poetry Now (Celtic Press £8.95), a poetry anthology for the new Leaving Certificate