slowly, but at an accurate pace

It has taken me three months to figure out why E------ is in the gifted class. It's taken this long because E has a habit of coming in late, talking back, and not turning in any work. The work he does turn in is mediocre at best. I like to remind him that IQ means nothing if not used, and if he doesn't want to work hard, there are plenty of kids in the "regular" class who want his spot. This happens on a good day. On a bad day, I yell at him for disrespecting his classmates, disrespecting me, disrespecting his own intelligence, and then I tell him to get out.

And here is why I love the writer's notebooks that we use to start class: On "free day"s like today, they can (and must) write about whatever they want. Some of them have multi-page novels going on that read suspiciously like an action movie script. Others write poems; some make lists. S----- uses this time to write about the latest celebrity gossip.

E, on this particular day, has decided to write about turntables. I stop, sensing a fleeting opportunity, to remind him that we're working on a composition about hands, and a DJ's hands would make a great focus for his prose poem.

So he writes:

My hands were moving backward and forward. Gliding from the outside to the inside of the record. The feeling of warm vinyl making its way from my fingertips to my palm. My hand slowly but at an accurate pace is moving the crossfader from left to right. The tip of my fingers setting the cue points, setting the pitch and the tempo. My fingers were also setting the equalizer so you could hear that down south southern rap, Bass.