getting down from the cross

i've begun re-thinking what I'm going to do in the 12U course next year. Normally, I have the students do a fairly intense independent study unit on contemporary canadian poetry. for many of them, it's the first encounter any of them have had with poetry in their english classes. so we have to build a poetics from scratch.
because of the dramatic absense of other poetry teaching in their classes, I've taken it upon myself to be the self-appointed saviour of the readership of canadian contemporary poetry. the words "if you don't do it, who will?" are lodged somewhere in my gut.

so, i'm thinking about not doing that next year.
I'm really tired of swimming upstream. and i don't think that saviour complex is healthy.

but what started me thinking about this was some excited thoughts i've been having about developing the media portion of the course further. the course's main focus is narrative. i just started thinking about how fun and exciting the course could be if i did something with media and narrative and identity for the ISU...
for a grade 12 course, i want to go conceptually deep. and the problem with teaching poetry in this context is that i can't go deep because i have to go broad as well. i also have to spend a lot of energy converting the dubious.
but television, movies, the internet, they understand these things already. and they like these things already. for a group of students who have no interest in the arts at all, doesn't it make more sense to start with something they *do* like, and enrich their understanding of it?