voyeurism

i've found a nice escape from fighting sleep in lafayette h.s. (there's plenty of dead time when you're observing a colleague do a 2hr lesson):

when i begin to feel the coffee wane, i step outside the classroom (nodding my authoritative head at the kids as i slide towards the door) and - after the requisite stops in the bathroom and water fountain - i wander the halls of lafayette, looking for other teacher corps people giving lessons. by now, it seems that most of the veteran teachers to which we're assigned have relegated their morning session to some level of teacher corp control, so it's not infrequent that i can peek into the thin window of a classroom door and see sarah, or rob, or adryon, or keila, or mason, etc. - arms waving, and voices raising, and eyes patrolling.

it's a bizzarelly pleasing moment - to walk unnoticed in the hall, listening devilishly to those people i'd just peeked in on (sometimes their students see me, and we smile with the shared knowledge) - their voices wisping under their doors, merging off the cinderblock walls, disappearing in the air conditioning.

we're teaching. we're figuring it out. something is being produced, or trying to be. some of our kids are dead asleep. some of them are laughing. some are learning. it's the moment (excuse the undepth of my metaphors, elizabeth) of the orchestra warming up. small growths of sound, quickly retracted to recalibrate, and grow again. spontaneous harmonies and dissonances - some followed, some abandoned. recognizable themes here, improvizations there. but, at least a continuity in the sense that we're trying to find the form (or find it again, or stay with it), trying to sharpen ourselves for the bigger stage. clearly, some of us have already found a few moments of clean performance - those are the more pleasing murmers of lafayette's hallway - but we'll need all the sound-check (to overextend the poetic moment) that we can get.

an orchestra warming-up indeed sounds like heat growing. like friction building, and the buzz of power lines. energy being organized, focused, tested. and, in the hallway, it's clear that we're all - perhaps half-consciously - joining in on the development of this strange warmth, we're all gravitating towards the same intangible hum, centering ourselves before we must truly create.

so, sometimes, escaping the classroom is the best part of my day.