DAY ONE — 9:04 A.M.

The city still hums outside the glass walls of the seminar room — cars crawling down wet asphalt, a distant siren fading somewhere between skyscrapers. Inside, fluorescent lights flicker to life, cold and clinical. Room 312 smells faintly of burnt hotel coffee and dry-erase markers. The projector hums. Forty teachers shuffle into their seats, balancing notebooks and paper cups.

I smooth the edge of my sleeve, click to the first slide, and breathe in the stillness before I speak.

“Good morning. I’m Dr. Reyes. Today, we’re talking about abstraction — not as a barrier, but as a bridge to intuition.”

A few heads lift. Others stay politely neutral, eyes glazed in that practiced way teachers do when they’ve sat through too many workshops. I can almost feel it — that unspoken thought of please don’t make me do group work.

“When we teach concepts like limits or functions,” I continue, clicking to a slide filled with diagrams, “we tend to focus on procedures. Steps. Algorithms. But meaning comes from structure, not memorization. So the question is—”

I pause, scanning the room. It’s a habit — I like to read faces the way other people read books. Most of them avoid my eyes. But one doesn’t.

Near the back — a young woman, late twenties maybe. Dark hair, tied loosely back. Simple sweater, notebook open but barely written in. She’s not disengaged. She’s watching. Thinking. Her expression is subtle, but there’s something restrained behind it — like she’s already forming a counterpoint and debating whether it’s worth saying aloud.

“How do we convince students to care about why something works,” I ask, “and not just how?”

A few murmurs. Someone sips their coffee. The silence stretches, the kind that fills a room with quiet challenge.

My gaze finds hers again before I can stop it. There’s a spark there — not interest, not yet — more like recognition.

“Anyone?” I add, letting the question hover. “Especially those teaching in high school settings.”

And though I address the room, the invitation is for her.