My Experience Processing Mass Shootings at Schools

When I think back to some of the toughest days I had as a teacher, violence seems to be a thread. Not violence at my school, but instead the challenge of debriefing and processing the world we live in with children.

My first year as a TA was the year of the Virginia Tech shooting. I worked in a third grade classroom, so it wasn’t something that registered with those specific kids, but I do recall the third grade teachers trying to figure out how to handle a potential question from a scared or informed 9-year-old. That was 2007. I was 23 and had just graduated college 10 months beforehand and was rather shaken at the idea that a school could experience that type of violence.

Flash forward to the December 2012 Sandy Hook shooting. I was teaching fourth grade and knew that I would have to start that Monday with a morning meeting to simply reiterate to 10 year olds that they are safe in school (Over the course of the weekend, teachers and admin tried to figure out the best way to handle the shooting). This is not a conversation I ever imagined I’d need to have with my students. Some kids had no idea what had happened, some kids were held out of school to avoid being part of the conversation, and others had a sense of what happened. All of them were a cocktail of curious and anxious and worried.

Amazingly, five months later I had to gather the exact same kids on a Tuesday morning to talk to them about the Boston bombing. Suddenly, in the span of half a year an elementary school in Connecticut and a marathon in our capitol city was attacked. The bombing was obviously closer to home for my students, some of whom had family running the marathon. I was at the top of Boylston St. when those bombs went off. Some of my students were down at the finish line before the bombs went off. That entire week had an unprecedented buzz around it in Boston due to the manhunt and the Thursday night gunfight and car chase that evolved into a a lockdown in the city to track down the bomber.

I remember opening that Boston Bombing conversation with a line like, “It’s really sad that we’ve had to sit down and start our day twice this year and talk about some sad and scary stuff.” I also remember the kids knowingly nodding their heads in agreement.

Some parents did not like the fact that these conversations were happening at school because they didn’t want to burst the protective bubble they live in. I didn’t really care because I think these are important conversations that kids want to have. If we were asking kids to go through Secure Campus drills, gathering in the corner of the room silently while the teacher locks the doors and pulls the blinds, then I believed they lived in a world where anxiety around violence existed, sadly. I was told by a teacher once that you can talk to any age kid about any topic, you just have to package it correctly and give it context.

In 1999 after the Columbine attack, my freshman English teacher took an entire class to stop everything and let a group of 18 boys process the violence. We talked about outcasts and unkindness and parenting and friendships and scapegoats (video games and the internet).

Now, in 2019 if we did stop and try to process mass shootings in America, we might not get much else done in the classroom. In my more recent years of teaching I found that after events like the The Tree of Life shooting last fall we simply put the flag at half-mast and kept our ears and eyes open for students that might be talking about what happened and seeking inroads to help particular kids process the event (having a counselor on campus helped, too. That role didn’t exist in 2012).

While violence feels like it’s reached its height with two shootings in 13 hours this past weekend (and a shooting in Gilroy last weekend), I also think that it’s becoming more difficult to speak about it with kids because a big part of it has been politicized; the narratives that go along with the shootings are now connected to our President and immigration and gun-control and mental health. It’s a quagmire of topics that all sit on the third rail. Teachers don’t want to be accused of spreading their own political agenda to their impressionable students.

Those fourth grade students that I sat down with to discuss Sandy Hook and the Boston Bombing are about to start their junior year of high school. They are getting ready to head into a world where they have read about shootings at an outdoor concert, a garlic festival, a movie theater, a night club, a school. a place of worship, a bar. Those are just the places I could come up with off the top of my head.

It’s saddening because I think that this current batch of high school age kids have this violence as a part of life and the immediate reaction on TV and the internet is for people to press their political views instead of trying figure out what is really going on in our country and the wider world where so many of these acts of violence are occurring.

I don’t even really know how to wrap all this up, to be honest. It’s just such a mess. These conversations were the most challenging parts of working at a school and they’ll stay with me long past my time in those classrooms, I hope that my students took something away from them just like I did in my freshman year class following Columbine.