August 2013: Magda learns the school hymn.
Guest starring real-life school students as the singing instructor and sound and light technicians.
Learning the school hymn is obligatory for all new students at Radosna. Singing lessons happen at first school week and are held by an older year student.
Episode four introduces the school hymn, a few stereotypes regarding the class groups and the popular control room at the auditorium.
Read more for trivia and translation notes!
The school hymn is a religious song written and composed specifically for Radosna. It contains the school name - Radosna Nowina 2000, “Good News 2000” and can be actually sung during a Catholic Mass. The students are learning to sing the song during their first days at school, because everyone will perform it together at the official school year opening which always takes place on September 8th. It's one of many traditions of the school.
Each year is divided into five class groups. Students who belong to the same class take all the courses together, go on school trips toghether and generally will enjoy their company until the end of school education - as opposed to school systems where there are different student groups for each course. Each class focuses on a different set of subjects, and the new sets are decided every year by the teachers based on what is currently trending on the labor market. During the times of this comics, there were four main sets/profiles with one doubled, and the class groups got their nicknames from the main subjects they learned: Humanity focuses on languages, history, social studies; for Biolchem it is biology and chemistry; for Mathphys - math and physics; and Matgeo focuses on math and geography. Those nicknames apply to the whole class groups as well as to individual students.
T/N:
I left the school hymn untranslated because, as far as I know, there is no official English version and I'm not skilled enough to translate religious songs. Basically it starts with the Biblical words "In the beginning was the Word" and describes the birth of Jesus Christ and two thousand years of Christianity; it also includes a short prayer for blessing, pure hearts and following God's path.
Also I translated the class nicknames based on English subject names, so it's Mathphys for Mat-fiz, Humanity for Human (I'm afraid it would be weird to randomly call characters Humans), Mathgeo for Mat-gej (logically in Polish it should be Matgeo as well, but it's easier to decline masculine nouns that end with a consonant), Biolchem for Biol-chem. They look similar but sound different, except for Mat-fiz which looks different but sounds similar.
Back on my old blog I recalled a random hymn I'd remembered from school, and it sparked off a bit of discussion via the comment system. I'm not a particularly (okay, not a remotely!) religious pers...
