Maybe read it as if it were a poem

When you practice "this is about/this is really about" on the day of a school shooting

In a recent lunch with a former colleague turned current friend, the subject of school shootings came up, along with complex PTSD. We both left full-time work in education the spring of 2021, after what I now think of as the Covid year.

In Oregon, schools were remote until that spring. Our governor prioritized vaccines for school personnel, and we returned to in-person learning in March, after we’d all gotten our shots. My friend, S., lives with a medical condition that would likely render Covid fatal. I will never forget walking past her middle school classroom in those first days after we returned, seeing her standing in front of a group of silent 7th graders in widely spaced desks, wearing both a mask and a plastic face shield. Classroom doors were open, but the hall was eerily quiet and empty, none of what had once been typical noise spilling out. I felt like a character in a dystopian novel.

My job that year was to oversee libraries not allowed to check out books, and to “support” teachers in complying with mandates that felt impossible to meet. After watching one, a beautiful, gentle human, break down in tears at the end of a Zoom staff development session that I had developed and facilitated, I confronted in new ways my complicity in perpetuating harm.

In the final days of that year, S. and I made our plans. We’d both thought and hoped we would work in education longer, but we both decided that the costs to our health were no longer worth the benefits. We pledged to be each other’s retirement buddy. She was disappointed when, in August, I took a part-time teaching job for the coming school year. It was in a school I’d left in 2009, one I’d helped create, one I’d loved. I told myself it would be different there.

That year, too, had its Covid challenges, but being back in a classroom felt like the right kind of hard. I will always be grateful that I got to end my career on that note, working directly with students. That school was different in important ways, and working there was a gift. Still, halfway through that year, I knew that even part-time teaching wasn’t going to work for me. The school shooting in Uvalde, Texas on May 24, 2022 helped confirm that.

That shooting came up in my conversation with S. when I shared that I’d recently had an essay published and that it was about that day. There was comfort and ease in not having to explain to S. anything about why a shooting in such a different kind of school than mine, so far away from me, had the impact it did.

“You know,” she said, “I’m finally in a place where every shooting doesn’t hit me the way they used to.” We talked about how different schools had been when we started teaching, before locked perimeters, security badges, security officers, hallway cameras, shooter drills, and “run, hide, fight.” We talked about what it did to us to be constantly on lookout for danger. We didn’t consciously feel it all the time; our conscious minds had so many other things to attend to. But we knew it was always there, just under the surface, in the way we came to respond immediately to anything out of the ordinary: a lone adult we didn’t recognize in the hall, a loud and unusual noise, unplanned fire alarms, a certain kind of agitated student. We’d suddenly be scanning, on high alert, running through possibilities in our heads, locating exits. We’d each had close enough encounters with physical danger at work that threats were never hypothetical or abstract for us. Our work environment had become dystopian long before the pandemic, and Uvalde helped me see that.

There’s more I might say. I have so many thoughts about what it’s doing to all of us (of course, some of us more than others) to live in a heightened state of threat and fear now, in so many different settings, from so many different sources. But that would take me down a deep and dark rabbit hole, and all I really want to do in today’s post is share a link to that essay and provide some context for it.

Here it is: “On the Morning of a Massacre of American Schoolchildren,” which is in the latest issue of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes.

I hope the words there say all the things I might say here, but in a better way. It is about a lesson in a high school English class, and about a school shooting, but it is really about more than either of those things. At least, I hope it is. Maybe read it as if it were a poem, if you click through. (Also, there’s an audio recording of it, if you’ve ever wondered what my voice sounds like.) And maybe read the poem that the essay hinges on, Jim Daniels’s “American Cheese.” It’s a good one. That we happened to be reading that poem on that day will always make me feel that there are forces at work in the universe beyond my ken.

Baby teacher Rita, circa 1990. Notice the lack of a computer on my desk. (We had one boxy beige Mac in a shared office I could use.) A watch on my wrist. That banged bob. I remember the student photographer directing my pose for an article in the school newspaper, and that day feels like both yesterday and a million years ago.

As always, thank you for reading. Please feel free to share thoughts and questions in the comments.

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Hoping you have a peaceful, rejuvenating weekend.