Emily Reinert's Profile

And then I heard, “Mr. McCourt, the principal is at the door.”

My heart sank as the principal entered, along with the superintendent of schools. Neither acknowledged me. They walked up and down, peering at papers. The superintendent picked one up, showed it to the principal.

The superintendent frowned. The principal pursed his lips. On their way out, the principal said the superintendent would like to see me.
Here it comes, I thought. The reckoning. The principal was sitting at his desk; the superintendent was standing. “Come in,” said the superintendent. “I just want to tell you that that lesson, that project, whatever the hell you were doing, was topnotch. Those kids were writing on the college level.”

He turned to the principal and said, “That kid writing an excuse note for Judas. Brilliant. I just want to shake your hand,” he said, turning back to me. “There might be a letter in your file attesting to your energetic and imaginative teaching. Thank you.”
God in heaven. High praise from an important person. Should I dance down the hallway, or lift and fly? Next day in class, I just started singing.
The kids laughed. They said, “Man, school should be like this every day, us writing excuse notes and teachers singing all of a sudden.” Sooner or later, I figured, everyone needed an excuse. Also, if we sang today we could sing tomorrow, and why not? You don’t need an excuse for singing.

You'll feast on the bodies of English and American literature. What a time you'll have with Carlyle and Arnold, Emerson and Thoreau. You can't wait to get to Shelley, Keats and Byron and good old Walt Whitman. Your classes will love all that romanticism and rebellion, all that defiance. You'll love it yourself, because, deep down and in your dreams, you're a wild romantic. You see yourself on the barricades.