On April 20th, when I was a junior in high school, I got out of my last class early, and I drove down the street to go visit my elementary school. I was standing in the classroom with my eighth-grade US History teacher talking about college and beyond, and getting my teaching certificate. Then my old math teacher walked in with this stunned look on his face. We were two hours ahead of Colorado time, and the news was just starting to reach us on the east coast of what had happened an hour before–two student gunmen had opened fire on their classmates in a high school in Littleton, Colorado.
I was old enough and sure enough of my path to becoming an educator that I identified with the shock and pain on my teachers’ faces; I was young enough and wrapped up enough in what at times seemed to be the insurmountable trials of adolescence that I could almost understand why kids my own age might be driven to do such a thing.
The face of American education changed that day. Students became people to fear. Teachers in almost every grade started having to look at the troubled kid not as someone to help, but as someone who might need to be put behind bars. And yet, in the face of that, many also stepped back and said, “Where are we failing?” Ther didn’t ask “How did we manage to let two kids get in here with guns?” but instead “How did we manage to let two kids get so lost that they felt they needed them?” They said they weren’t going to walk away because there might be a Dylan or an Eric, but that they were going to teach so that the Dylans and Erics would never feel driven to do such a thing.
Leave a Reply