A teacher’s perfect moment in the classroom (involving John Milton and John Mayer)

I was therefore caught entirely off-guard when the opening strums of “Dreaming with a Broken Heart” came over the speakers and the class exploded with energy and excitement. Everyone in the room instantly knew the song and recognized the connection. Some students literally jumped up and down as they realized that over three hundred years earlier, poets had gotten there first, that all those years ago grief and sadness, loss and longing were still best told in verse, not prose, and they began feverishly writing, underlining and circling words to make it clear that John Mayer and John Milton were writing about the same thing.