The Living Rockumentary

Here's my first post emanating from the bank of computers in the teacher's lounge at Springfield Central HighSschool. As some of you know, my first mini-lesson a couple weeks ago involved the simile of a boy jumping off a roof and landing on the pavement "like a sugar donut." Tomorrow, I'm making my second appearance in front of a class to do a period-long lesson on the following John Keats poem:

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love; - then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

And then next week I'll be instituting myself as a regular student teacher where we'll be plunging into Elie Wiesel's Night, after a background history lesson on The Holocaust. I swear I am only using texts that the curriculum frameworks insist upon but the end result is that my first impression upon these kids is that Mr. Westcott is some kind of dark, death-obsessed freak.