Another day, another school shooting.
For the past 12 hours or so, ever since I heard the news out of Northern Illinois, I've been trying to collect and somehow make sense of the feelings and thoughts swirling around in my head. I know for myself, and probably many others in my profession, the idea of any sort of harm or violence coming to our students as they sit in our classes is one of the toughest, grimmest thoughts ever. I sat staring blankly out my window last night after I heard the news, feeling some sort of unease and terror wash through me. To take solace in the idea that "this couldn't happen here" no longer works. It only seems to be a matter of time now before all the bomb and gun threats that come and go each semester cease being threats and turn real.
Even though I had been enrolled at a University for a couple years, 1999 was the year I finished high school. It was almost exactly a month before I officially graduated that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, both who were my age, did what no one wanted to believe was possible. I remember watching it unfold on television before I went off to work that evening, unsettled but curiously calm. It didn't seem real. Columbine HS was thousands of miles away from my own small city in Iowa. Even though all of my friends (including myself) owned and had easy access to firearms, the thought of ever doing anything like that had never once even crossed our minds. It was unfathomable. Simply unfathomable.
There was an outcry, lots of media attention, but by the next day or so, my friends and I had moved on. It really didn't seem to affect us, and was filed away in our minds as something of a historical nature, but not a living, breathing moment that changed us.
Almost exactly 8 years later, Seung-Hui Cho walked on to the Virginia Tech campus and, before the end of the day, 33 people including himself were dead as a result of his actions. In those 8 years I had moved from the audience in a classroom to the front of the classroom. I, along with many of my colleagues, were overwhelmed by reports of the indiscriminate carnage, the magnitude of loss, and of the stories of professors such as Dr. Librescu who held the door shut to his classroom while taking gunfire all in the name of buying his students some time so they could live. Dr. Librescu survived the Holocaust but died that afternoon.
For me, suddenly it became personal. This was no longer something we just watched on TV. This was now the world I lived in. And it hit me hard.
Every year (if not every semester), I encounter student writing that raises eyebrows. This was especially true when I was teaching creative writing classes. My colleagues and I were no stranger to stories, poems, plays, and non-fiction pieces in which we felt uncomfortable, queasy, or nervous as readers. Until Virginia Tech, I, as well as most of my colleagues, faced this darkness with an overwhelming belief in trust. We knew our students had problems, but we trusted them. We trusted them to be capable of handling it in their own way. We referred them to help when necessary, but sought to take solace in understanding. Understanding that recognized that we all have troubles and sometimes writing is the first place in which we face the ugliness we perceive. We understood this because, as human beings, this was the reason many of us were writers in the first place.
After VT, that trust was profoundly shaken. Stories were no longer just stories. They were credible threats. They were whispers of a tragic tomorrow. They were no longer explorations; they became warning signs. Many, out of fear, clamped down on what could and could not be written. We turned to rigidity and guidelines to get rid of the darkness. Of course, we didn't get rid of the darkness, we just stopped looking at it.
The effects of this have been chilling, especially for those at the front of the classroom. Every time the words "shooting" and "school" appear in a headline, my thoughts immediately turn to every student who wrote things that didn't quite fit in. I think of every student I've had to give a bad grade to simply because I couldn't find a way to get through to them. I wonder about the people walking in halls while classes are in session. I find myself wondering what I would have to do to barricade a door should I ever hear gunfire. I wonder if I, like Dr. Librescu, would take 5 9mm hollow point bullets to my body to protect the very thing I care most about: the safety of my students.
When those in education used to talk about "safe-spaces," we were referring to a safe place for all sorts of ideas, even if they were not popular or deemed "proper." But now, when elementary and secondary classrooms are equipped with color coded cards to be stuck out of the bottom of doors to indicate safety of a classroom should the SWAT team ever have to come, the idea of a "safe-place" takes on a whole other connotation. And as we barricade ourselves in our classrooms from the physical threats of the world, even ideas no longer seem capable of being safe.
As much as we try to put on our game faces and head back into our classrooms fearless in the face of danger, every time a student dies in a classroom, we're reminded that somehow, something is going on that we don't understand and have very little control over. It pulls the rug out from under us. And for many of us, the bruises we get each time this happens never seem to have a chance to heal before it happens again.
I wish I had something I wish people could consider, a wish I could have granted, an issue we could all re-evaluate. But I have nothing.