The Day After

Tomorrow, the day after 19 children were murdered in an elementary school on a Tuesday afternoon in May, I will walk into my classroom knowing that what I had planned is irrelevant. 

I don't know how many times we've had to do this -- walk into a classroom after a mass shooting and fumble our way through. No, literally, I have no idea how many times. Too many. 

All over social media, folks are asking this absurd question: How many children have to be murdered before we do something? It's absurd because we already know that there is no number. If twenty children weren't enough in 2012, twenty aren't enough ten years later, with all the murdered children before and in between. 

The question is absurd, because this isn't something that randomly continues to happen to us. America has chosen this. It is our horror and our shame, and there is no bottom to it.

This will be my nineteenth post specifically tagged with "Guns in America." Nineteen children, so far. The number keeps climbing. 

Tomorrow, I will go to school and grapple with what it means to be a teacher and love students in a country that does not value our lives. Just like every other teacher in America. We're not okay.

This afternoon I texted back and forth with one of my beloved 2018 babies, who was my student and TA during her senior year when seventeen people were murdered at school in Parkland, Florida. Our school building back in 2018 was a nightmare to secure -- so many points of entry, so many unlocked doors -- but at the same time, my classroom had two doors. I knew we could run out one and be outside; the other would take us into an inner room that led to other classrooms, other spaces to hide, other spaces to escape through.

Rachel remembers thinking that she'd run to my room or to the science room, because there were more of those back rooms.

"I imagined every scenario," she said. "How fucked up is that?"

But I did, too. All the time. I remember a sophomore asking me, "What would we do?" And I told them. We talked through how we'd get out, where they'd run, where they'd hide if they couldn't run.

I've posted this conversation before. It went like this:

"But what do you do?"

"I do my damndest to make sure he doesn't get to you."

"You just stay and get shot? That's messed up. We'd stay with you."

"No. You don't."

Look, I'm pretty fucking pissed that's part of the job description, too. But it is. It just is.

Anyway.

Tomorrow I'm going to school the day after a mass shooting where nineteen more babies were slaughtered at school in America. Tomorrow I'm going to go to school and teach in a country that keeps choosing this. And I'm going to talk about it with my kids, because they'll want to. I know them that well by now. My fifth period is going to have a lot of feelings and a lot of questions, and I'll tell you right now that I don't give the remotest of shits that I've been directed to administer the district reading test.

Not long ago, one of them asked, "If we had to get out of this building, how would we even do it?" Our new school is a building ready for violence. In a lockdown, classroom doors lock automatically from the inside and hallway doors seal us inside our corridors. I suppose this should make me feel safe; instead it makes me feel trapped. We haven't actually even had a fire drill since October or something, and even that wasn't so much a drill as it was our too-sensitive smoke alarms tripping every time some kid vaped in a bathroom. When that happens now, they cancel the alarm and tell us all to stay in class. We have no idea what to do in a real emergency anymore. Last fall when we tried to evacuate our three-story building, everyone poured out one entrance, slowly, heading to the football field. I know where my daughter is during every period. Once, she was in weight training; the door was likely open already. Once, she was on the third floor, and my heart drummed madly in my chest. I don't think we even got everyone out of the building before those of us on the field were herded back in.

So I don't know that I'm going to have any answers for them, but I owe them the space to ask and to talk if they want it.

I'm a mama and a teacher and I exist in a perpetual state of terror and grief and rage and hopelessness. I'm grieving hard tonight. And the rage at our apathy and our inhumanity continues to build.

If you're not a teacher, know that we are not okay. Spare us platitudes and prayers without action. It might be possible for you to go to work tomorrow and carry on like normal, even if you're grieving, too (because I know so many of you are also working through terror, grief, and rage) but it's not possible for us. What that looks like in each classroom depends on what our kids need. But even if our kids need us to create a sense of normalcy tomorrow, please know that it's not normal, it's not okay, and so many of us still feel that we're going at this alone, in a deep, lonely darkness. And I just don't see that changing.