Gwen Feindel, a business and computer teacher at Denver’s North High School, was grading papers in her room during lunch time when she heard faint voices coming over the PA system. As Feindel tells it: ``The principal was trying to calm an irate parent, and I could eavesdrop on this! How interesting! I decided to turn off the lights, keep eating my lunch, and roll the chair closer to the PA box on the wall. Better yet, if I climbed onto a file cabinet, I could hear better. As I perched on top of the file cabinet, eating a banana, with my ear to the PA box, a student entered the room for extra help. I had forgotten to lock the door! The startled student, with eyes glazed and mouth wide open, slowly backed out the door.’' Feindel’s lunch-time surprise story won first place in The Denver Post’s Teachers’ Best Stories competition.
A version of this article appeared in the November 01, 1990 edition of Teacher Magazine as Dining In The Dark
