The Window Watchers

'Nevermind, ' I want to cry out.
'It doesn't matter about fragments.
Finding them or not. Everything's
a fragment and everything's not a fragment.
Listen to the music, how fragmented,
how whole, how we can't separate the music
from the sun falling on its knees on all the greenness,
from this moment, how this moment
contains all the fragments of yesterday
and everything we'll ever know of tomorrow! '

-Al Zolynas, from "Love in the Classroom"

When I look up from the yellow legal pad where I've been recording our class discussion, his eyes are out the window again. I'm irritated. This is one of five students who has made this conversation--the creation of a class constitution to govern an unruly fifth period--necessary in the first place. With only fifteen students (and twelve showing up on any given day), the five denizens of distraction hold the destiny of fifth period in their never-still hands. And so, today, I'm sitting at the front of the room and filling out a chart to answer two essential questions:

What do you want (from this class)?

What are you willing to do (and stop doing) to get it?

It has been a while since I've been at the front of the classroom. I've faded into the background in order to give a teaching intern experience teaching and managing ninth graders. I've still been in the room, for the most part, but my existence there has been strictly silent. In all of those speechless hours, the Students and Teachers have once again grown distinct in my mind. My intern and I are in the well-defended Teacher camp, sternly administering punishments and directing discussions, while the rest have melted into the Student masses, loving nothing more than free time and noise for its own sake. They are not pleasant categories, and I've entered today's discussion with a scowl, despite my genuine pleasure at teaching again. The endless distraction of this student merely deepens the frown, as I follow his eyes to the window.

Outside, snow is falling sparsely. He loves all weather, this student with his averted gaze. He covers blank papers, backs of notebooks, and the margins of assignments with weather maps, complete with coded precipitation, wind direction and speed, and high and low pressure areas. Snow, however, is a special passion, and throughout this winter of more snow than usual he is often the first to tell me when flurries are on the horizon.

"Hey, over here!" I redirect.

"Hm, what?" the weatherman replies.

"So, what kinds of things will help us get to these goals up here?"

"Which ones are the goals?" someone asks.

"Um, number one. 'What do you want?' So, what kind of behavior?"

The kids stare at me blankly, more and more of them stealing glances to the windows. I look out again, and it's falling faster than before, a misty white veil between our windows and the science building and the trees across the street.

"Snow!" he sighs from the back row.

"Wow, snow," I repeat. "OK, you can look at the snow, but we need to finish this..."

The students shrug agreement, dragging mental attention back to the constitution we're writing. They call out a few helpful behaviors--coming on time, listening, doing homework every night--and I jot them down in a column labeled "HELP". This might help, I think hopefully, even as I ponder how a behavior like "Come to class on time" helps accomplish a goal as grand as "Better understand the meaning of life" (an actual desire of a fifth period student). But still, worth a try.

"OK, now what kind of behaviors will keep you from getting everything you want out of class?" I write "HURT" over a new column, draw a line, waiting for answers without looking at them. When I finally do, it's only as I'm repeating the question.

"Come on, folks, what kind of..." But when I look up to learn why they aren't answering, I understand at once. The snow is cascading past the window, so fast and weightless in front of the thunder-darkened sky that our whole classroom might be suspended in the stars. "Wow. That's... that's really distracting." It's all I can say before I, too, fall into mesmerized silence, staring out at the much-loved Seattle snow.

In an instant my caricatured Teachers and Students fall to pieces, the bizarre exaggerations of a teacher who's spent too much time outside of the classroom lately. Back with them, sharing a snowfall, I remember that we're in this together, all of us, learning every day.

It's a student who moved from Utah in September who breaks the spell.

"Snow!" he scoffs. "Whatever!"

"Shh." And I can't tell how many of us said it, as we blink against the black and white swirling around.