School Shootings

My second year teaching, first day of the Spring semester, a student I had in the Fall and knew well walked to the trashcan to throw out some candy wrappers, took a right, and headed down a row of desks. Another kid who was in my class for the first time but I knew him already, stood up. Next thing the boys* were fighting, they knocked over a bookshelf, blood was everywhere. The students laughed, they thought it was play fighting until the blood shot out like a sprinkler then they all moved away to watch and cheer. I got security; it took five guards to break these young men up. My entire class was dismissed to the cafeteria b/c my room had to be bleached down by the janitors due to the copious amounts of blood. The latex gloves I was advised to keep in my classroom came in handy that day.

*boys = over 6 feet tall muscular 16-17 year olds

As I was hustling the students out the door and trying to maintain my composure, I started to cry. Not crazy cry, but a few tears slid out as I desperately tried to maintain my composure.

The next day the students filed in and heckled me relentlessly for my tears. "What, Miss, you ain't never seen a fight before?" Ummmmmm, no, not in real life. They were ASTONISHED, seriously shocked that I had not seen another person get beaten up in real life before. They started going on and on about the shit they'd seen, and it was scary. "Miss, you ain't never seen someone get pistol-whippped?" Ummmmmm....I have never even seen a gun before. They were shocked. I was shocked. And we both sat there in shock of our differences. Key word: shock.

But we continued to talk and I told them my fears--if it's okay to break some one's nose in class, is it okay to shoot them, too? And from this conversation came a theory that has held up year-to-year in my classes, even as our population has shifted and got a little more "urban" (as educational literature likes to call poor people of color in the city):

The students explained that they keep the street on the street. That beating someone up in school is one thing, but pulling knife or a gun on them is another. A lot of them admitted to bringing knives to school daily not to fight in school, but for the purpose of commuting home to the projects after dark on sketchy trains and on sketchier streets. They all said that their guns stayed at home, always. "Street is street, miss, you can't change that..." but they had NO desire to bring the real throes of urban life into their school.

And that's how it has remained. In my 8 years of teaching in this high school, we have had one knife pulled in a fight and one incident where a kid bought a gun to school (to show it off to his friends, but some other kids saw it and thought that was uncool and anonymously snitched--very unlike our population). That might seem like a lot to you, but we literally have fist fights 3-5 times a week? Maybe more? Considering the number of fights/violence we have, the fact that weapons are left out says something to me. The students honestly do want that element of the street to stay in the street.

And that is what I think is different between kids who grow up amid violence and kids in the suburbs who decide to go shoot up their school/university. For my students, yes, violence is glamorized in a lot of ways, but it is also their daily reality. For the Columbine young men or the VA Tech guy, that violence was a fantasy world that they sought to make a reality and gain notoriety for. Fantasy: reality--therein lies the difference to me.

I hope and pray to the universe that I can make it through a career of teaching without ever witnessing a school shooting, but each time I teach "Bowling for Columbine" and re-watch the school footage of those young men on their warpath, each time I hear of a teacher trying to save his/her students in such a crisis, I revise my escape plan from my classroom and hope that the street stays on the street.