One teacher, recounts her mixed feelings, to Robert Reich, as she enters the new school year.
My new school does the I Love U Guys model. We teach with our doors locked and closed all the time. We stay and barricade. We practice the system a bunch of times per year and assure the children that we’ll protect them with our lives if necessary.
Last week, my brother’s and my sister’s kids’ school was the latest site of a school shooting [The Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis]. My brother was there, as was my sister’s husband. They all saw it. They were all there at Mass, not a location we normally practice in, by the way. We don’t practice escaping shooters at lunch or recess or in the auditorium because it’s super logistically hard to do. I think today’s shooters know that. All of today’s madmen and women have been through the same drills I just described for the last twenty-six years themselves.
So… in addition to being in a job where, despite my talents and qualifications and dedication to the craft, my earnings are capped in the five figures…
… in addition to being in a job where all/most/some parents think they know more than I do about how to teach…
…in addition to being in a job that suffers the whims of public opinion about our lack of quality and suitability as professionals…
…in addition to being in a job where successfully writing and publishing four novels makes me LESS employable (thanks to the snobbery of high school English departments??)…
I also have to be ready to die at work.
I already thought about it a lot, and now that six of my family members have actually been shot at in school, I’ll think about it more. I’ll go back tomorrow because I have to (I need a full-time income, I have a life and family), and also because it’s my vocation. I’ve always wanted to be a teacher.
But I don’t want to do it tomorrow.
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My thanks to Kathleen West for her teaching, her courage,