Storm in the Library

Last Tuesday afternoon, Period 6. My tiny Library classroom had been annexed and pieced together from two conferences rooms, filled with red crates instead of bookshelves, IKEA clock ticking merrily on the wall. The latest expansion led to our acquisition of a bank of tall windows which open to a central courtyard. These windows have proven incredibly useful for the moments when my small classes have actually busied themselves with academic pursuits, a bizarre circumstance that leaves me, the teacher, essentially extraneous to the classroom. In these long times of uselessness, I stare out of the window.

Today I have been watching two eleventh graders write essays. After micromanaging for a few minutes, I decide to stop bothering them and turn to the rescuing window. I see the class across the courtyard busily working away, and feel a pang of insecurity. That teacher looks busy, helping her students, and the students look like they are engaged in actual learning. What am I doing, assigning essays? I am a fraud, and the teacher across the courtyard must know it, when she glances up from her relevant lessons to catch me staring out the window.

Tiring of the convicting window, I turn my gaze to the sky, which at 1:45 is nearly dark. The trees beyond the last row of classrooms are tossing like grass, uneasily swaying in the wind. The clouds have wrinkled into layer upon layer of muted grey, until little of the afternoon light shines through. Rain in Seattle must be extreme for me to notice it after weeks of incessant drizzle, but now I look up and take note of the near-horizontal stripes of rain that batter my window. When the hail starts, I rise from my chair to watch.

Weather has always fascinated me, and now is no different. I realize that the storm is too good for these students to miss. They have been good today, I justify to myself as I cry, "Hey, come look at this, you guys!" In an instant all five of them are beside me at the window, their seventeen-year-old faces pressed in wonder to the glass.

In this particular class, I am the only one born in the United States, the only native English speaker, and the only one for whom hail is a fairly regular occurence. The boys in the class shout wild exclamations at the sky, one girl tells about a hailstone the size of a golfball, which once fell on her head, and another girl, from the Philippines, has apparently never seen ice of any kind falling from the sky. I glance out and see my neighbor across the courtyard, frantically competing with the storm for the attention of her students. She smiles when she sees us, the tiny reading class, lined up at the window with delighted faces. I suppose it might be an indulgent smile, the smile you give to a cute puppy or a toddler ballerina--or a first-year teacher--but it is a smile. For a moment I forget that this isn't reading, that this might not help them pass the WASL, and I know that they are learning.

"What is this?" my international students ask. "What's it called? How do you say it?""Hail," I say, trying to salvage a concrete vocabulary lesson. I spell it in purple capitals on the board: H-A-I-L. "Hail," they say to themselves and each other. "Hail," they repeat as they watch the pea-sized stones bounce on the cement of the courtyard. And I know that they have, once again, learned more than I have taught. I was just the one who let them leave their seats, let them run to the window and learn from the world.