I will never forget the afternoon before my first day as a middle school teacher in Central New Jersey. Textbooks and worksheets were scattered on the bed in the house where I lived with my father. I was her 25 and had just gotten my teaching license. My nerves were frayed – as all novice teachers know, there’s nothing more terrifying than a new classroom full of young people.
In the days before school started, I hoped that the classroom procedures, induction activities, and first week of classes would be engaging. I didn’t sleep much the night before and survived her first week of teaching about pure adrenaline. I wondered if my students liked me and wanted to be in my classroom. I was desperate to earn their family’s trust and looked forward to the opportunity to build a relationship in the following year.
I wasn’t obsessed with escape routes, closets, and cabinets to hide from bullets, or worried that gunmen would break into my school and head down the hallway to my English art class. .
This was 16 years ago. My formal teacher preparation did not include workshops or simulations. It dealt with the possibility of my death in a way that teachers and students are now called upon to do, highly choreographed and aggressive aggressor training.
Lockdown procedures did exist, but they felt more formal than necessary at the time. In his 2006, when I began my teaching career, there were 11 school shootings, but they all seem to have happened in New Jersey, away from my classroom. So far this year he has had 29 and since 2018 he has had 118 school shootings, according to Education Week, which tracks school environments and safety.
I think most educators are bound by the same fears now. It’s not a question of if schools will be shaken by shootings, it’s a question of when. It leaves me with a burning rage against the small but powerful group of politicians who have allowed this farce to continue unabated.
I am currently teaching college level students. My job is to prepare future teachers to take charge of their own classrooms. This is an experience to obtain a state license. This process requires developing expertise in content, current theory, and methods for effective teaching. Our simulations include classroom reading, Socratic questioning techniques, and discussion and discussion of the novel’s themes.
There is no need to teach future teachers how to disarm and outrun school attackers. It shouldn’t be a teacher’s job. Politicians, not teachers, should lose sleep to figure out how to solve this crisis. This is why we vote for them. This is why we pay their salaries with our taxes.
But lawmakers like Texas Senator Ted Cruz and former President Donald Trump want to arm teachers in the classroom as an answer to the gun violence epidemic. This interpretation of the teacher’s responsibilities is simply a way of shifting the blame onto educators for problems that only legislators can solve.
Yet our politicians continue to bury their heads in the sand. For example, Republicans in Michigan blocked all efforts to implement reasonable gun control measures in the wake of the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in May.
The move was a bitter slap in the face given Michigan’s another shooting at Oxford High School last December in which a high school student killed four of his classmates.
I can confidently say that it’s not my job to prepare teachers for the possibility of gunmen breaking into schools, but it’s also true that I’m no longer sure what my job entails.
The lack of gun control has ruined everything I’ve ever believed about what it means to be a teacher. Suddenly, the basis of lesson planning and grading was no longer important. That’s when he killed 19 children in the latest shooting in Uvalde.
How do you teach future teachers to plan, have meaningful conversations, and engage students when politicians refuse to keep them safe? How can you convince them that they will be safe in the classroom of the future when they can’t? Teaching is worthwhile and sustainable when reality tells a very different story. How can I convince my students that it is a viable career in
Even in the context of our legislators’ shocking inaction, part of the responsibility for training teachers for potential school shootings falls on me, who is deeply involved in their preparation. I can’t help but feel that
I live and work in Michigan. In Michigan, nearly every election cycle oscillates between my palatable purplish-blue and scary bloody political leanings. But almost a decade here has seen teachers wanting to arm themselves and expensive and intensive teacher training focused more on aggressive attacker scenarios than on developing a love of reading, writing and thinking. I have never met a teacher who wanted
Teachers in Texas marched to his office in Austin to loudly protest Ted Cruz’s handling of the Uvalde school shooting. Our priorities are clear. Teachers want safe classrooms where they can focus on teaching and learning tasks. Only in the US is this considered a difficult order.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial attitude of Al Jazeera.
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