You mean to say you left out the Britten?! 
Sorry, not enough time!
Later in the school year, for the 8th Grade, I think I will try the
Symphonia Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei by
Elliott Carter. I have used it now and then with not bad results. The students translate part of the text, and then I play excerpts.
Romanticism would not be involved with that work...
or would it? 
If we agree that a certain lionization of the "Irrational" (usually seen as a reaction against the Enlightenment) is a hallmark of the 19th-century Romantics, then I do wonder more and more about the complaints against many of our 20th-century composers, as well as our contemporary ones. The more I listen to them and our contemporary ones, I find that there is a great deal of expression of the "irrational" side, despite all the mathematical blather one sees in analyses about permutations, set theory, etc. And if I see
Webern's music described one more time as "cerebral" I will reach for my revolver!

Because in the end the ultimate question is...
how does it sound? And when I hear e.g.
Hartmann's Sixth and
Seventh Symphonies, the
Shostakovich Tenth,
Wyschnegradsky's assorted quarter-tone works,
Penderecki's Threnody,
Ovchinnikov's Symphony #1,
Explosante-fixe by
Boulez,
Saariaho's L'Amour de Loin, our own
Luke Ottevanger's piano works and
Karl Henning's Annabel Lee or
Out in the Sun, I believe that I hear an expressivity that will rival that of the Romantics, whether traditional tonality is used, stretched, or even meticulously avoided, and whether these composers sneer at the notions of the Romantics or not.
I realize, of course, that many do not hear this emotional intensity because of the composers' non-Romantic idiom: my own unsuccessful attempt to interest people in my quarter-tone efforts (I lost count of the wrinkled noses and incredulous faces I saw, as soon as the first notes were sounded) gave witness to this fact. Again, despite that, I viewed my own oeuvre, no matter how experimental (e.g. 19-tone quarter-tone scales), as a descendant of the Romantic heritage of the 19th century.
That applies also to certain of my novels as well!