OPERA-TIVE WORDS.(ARTS)

Byline: STEVE BARNES STAFF WRITER

ALBANY -- Cutting through the air more shrilly than the onscreen soprano flinging out one glorious high C after another came an unwelcome but not unexpected sound in Albany High School Classroom 306:

A ringing telephone.

The students laughed as their teacher, Chuck Coleman, smiled abashedly and said into the telephone, without a greeting or a pause for a response, ``Sorry, I got carried away.''

Then Coleman turned down the music and the class resumed watching a laser disc recording of a Metropolitan Opera production of Puccini's ``Turandot.'' They were preparing for a New York City trip to The Met the following December day to see the opera live.

They were watching, as they always do, on a 53-inch television, with a surround-sound stereo system pumping Puccini's grand melodies through the room -- indeed, through many of the adjoining rooms. One current student says she decided to take the class after Coleman's cacophony disrupted her next-door math class last year. Urban legend Like Coleman's teenage pupils, whose parents at home demand they soften their stereos, the teacher isn't a stranger to requests that he lower the volume. If he had any nearby neighbors in the woods of Rensselaer County where he lives, he'd get calls there, too, and would say, ``Sorry, I got carried away.''

That's part of why he's so good at his job, why students refer to him as ``a legend.'' And that's why this course, an upper-level English elective called Humanities that focuses on performing and visual arts, has 117 students this year -- more than 10 times as many as when Coleman began teaching it, in 1991.

``I get students coming in all the time saying they want to drop one course or another,'' said Marna Atkin, an Albany High guidance counselor. ``Nobody ever comes in wanting to drop …