http://www.angelamaiers.com/2012/12/there-is-no-lesson-plan-for-tragedy-teachers-you-know-what-to-do.html There is no lesson plan for tragedy

Diane, I wanted to share this post from @AngelaMaiers Teachers need to be proud of who we are and what we do for our students.

Stand tall!

This reader agrees that it can be done:

Why do we need semi-automatic guns? I grew up on a farm surrounded by guns. Any hunter who cannot hit a running jackrabbit, or coyote, with a single shot 22 is not much of a hunter. Hunting is not a justification!

Look at the statistics! This is a good question for an advanced mathematics class to address. How often has a privately owned semi-automatic weapon saved a life in the US due to the fact it was semi-automatic? Has it happened once this year? How often has a privately owned semi-automatic weapon murdered a person in the US, and turned a disaster into a multiple death disaster due to being semi-automatic?

The following is from the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/opinion/sunday/kristof-do-we-have-the-courage-to-stop-this.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

“Other countries offer a road map. In Australia in 1996, a mass killing of 35 people galvanized the nation’s conservative prime minister to ban certain rapid-fire long guns. The “national firearms agreement,” as it was known, led to the buyback of 650,000 guns and to tighter rules for licensing and safe storage of those remaining in public hands.

The law did not end gun ownership in Australia. It reduced the number of firearms in private hands by one-fifth, and they were the kinds most likely to be used in mass shootings.

In the 18 years before the law, Australia suffered 13 mass shootings — but not one in the 14 years after the law took full effect. The murder rate with firearms has dropped by more than 40 percent, according to data compiled by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, and the suicide rate with firearms has dropped by more than half. “

Another sad, sad day in our country. It is time to mourn for the families of this school and community. But it is also time for our elected officials and citizens to enact serious gun control and to support an adequate mental health system, beginning with counselors and psychologists in our schools.

When the first news of the school shootings in Connecticut was reported, there were many inaccuracies, which is inevitable. One source said 20 were dead, another said “nearly 30.” Some said the shooter’s mother was a teacher at the school (not true), then said she was a substitute teacher (also not true). The name of the killer was wrong.

Only now is the full story emerging.

This is the fullest account I have seen of what happened inside the school, published by the Washington Post.

One cannot read this account without being impressed by the calm and courage of the teachers, the principal, and staff of the school. They exhibited grace under the most terrible circumstances. They put their students first, before their own lives. Now we know what it means to put students first.

Now, will all the phonies and charlatans who have spent the past few years building careers, enlarging their bank account, and winning headlines by trashing educators have the good manners to just go away?

I could name names, but why bother? We know who they are. They know who they are.

Next time one of them begins his or her routine about “bad teachers,” say this: “Sandy Hook Elementary School.”

I don’t have Twitter but I read your blog faithfully. I am crying right now–grief stricken over what happened and I can add nothing to what you and others have said. I am from Michigan–a retired public school teacher who is lucky enough to have many students who have stayed in touch with me 30 years after I taught them–I taught high school–and I was also a labor union consultant at Michigan Education Association and now am a publisher of a regional woman’s magazine in Michigan–and yes, that makes me a small business owner. I have been active here in Michigan trying to stop the heinous laws that have been enforced. I am active with a group that is trying to get the truth out about Muskegon Heights–it is worse than the public and media know.
I don’t understand guns that are made specifically to kill people–I never have–and I thank you for all that you do.

A retired teacher in Louisiana saw this on Facebook and sent it to me. She did notknow who wrote it. I thought it was beautiful.
I separated the lines without changing a word and it read like a poem. It has been tweeted and retweeted more than 200 times.

To parents who are not educators, this may be hard to understand.
Five days a week, we teach your kids.
That means we educate your kids.
Play with your kids.
Discipline your kids.
Joke with your kids.
Console your kids.
Praise your kids.
Question your kids.
Beat our head against a wall about your kids.
Laugh with your kids.
Worry about your kids.
Keep an eye on your kids.
Learn about your kids.
Invest in your kids.
Protect your kids and yes, love your kids.

WE WOULD ALL TAKE A BULLET FOR YOUR KIDS.

It’s nowhere in our job description.
It isn’t covered in the employee handbook.
It isn’t cited in our contracts.
But we would all do it.
So, yes, please hug your kids tonight, really, really tight.
But on Monday, if you see your kids’ teacher, please hug them too.

I certainly don’t want to oversimplify, but I think it has a lot to do with “rugged invididualism”. There’s such a sense in this country that we are in it alone, every man for himself, we’re solely responsible for our own success or failure, even our own life or death, etc. Somehow most other countries still seem to understand, at least more generally and broadly, that we’re all in this together and “no man is an island”.

Thank you for this beautiful and important post. I would only say that mourning takes a different shape and time for each person. There is a reason for timed, structured mourning–memorials, funerals, moments of silence, acts of commemoration–yet none of these can direct a person’s private sadness.

For me, this is a day of mourning, but I will also be grading homework and reading Donne. I do not see this as contrary to mourning. Last night I listened to an extraordinary performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony and found that it expanded my world a little and, with that, brought out sadness.

It is sadness over yesterday’s terrible events, and also over our tense and reactive society with its demand for instant satisfaction and instant results. I do not know that that had anything to do with the murderer’s state of mind. He may have been planning this act for years; he may have done the same in a kinder world. Nor would the teachers and children have shown such bravery if our world were uniformly reactive and self-serving. Any age is complex; it is difficult to say one thing unequivocally about it.

All the same, it’s an age of bombardment. There is little respite. Yesterday, within an hour of the news of the murders, I received two hormone ads by email. (I have a spam filter, but things get through anyway.) At the movie theater, the previews are not only violent but aggressively and frighteningly uniform; they seem to follow a formula of loud noises, swift scene changes, shootings, hackneyed lines, and confused narrative–and you get a whole string of such previews before the movie starts. At restaurants, the music is cranked up loud on purpose: so people have to talk over it and thus build up a “buzz.”

Again, this may not have anything to do with what happened in Newtown. But the sense of bombardment and overload is not making people kinder, either. I find this in the classroom, every day. I have to stop things over and over to remind kids to take turns speaking. When many students are talking at once, about any number of topics, the train of thought gets lost. It takes quite a bit of doing to build the necessary pauses and quiet–without resorting to regimentation. There is little sense (in the larger society) of what it means to listen, to think, to let an idea build, to take in various aspects of an issue, to look into someone’s eyes. I dream of a world where people quiet down just enough to take something or someone in.

“So runs my dream, but what am I?”

One of our parent volunteers sent our principal an email thanking us all for conducting code red drills. We had another drill yesterday. I cannot fathom what would drive someone to murder his mother, and try to destroy what she cared about, and I am saddened that code red drills are necessary, but I am glad we do them! So are our students’ families. Keep up the good fight !

Guns aside, have any other teachers thought, what you you do if this happened in your classroom? I can’t be the only one that has thought about that, given recent events in America. What would I do? Would I have the compassion and courage and composure that these teachers displayed? Would I be able to tell my kids that I love them and that they were like my children to me? Would I be able to keep them quiet yet keep their minds off the horrible things going on in the building? Each and every one of us may have to face that situation some time in the future. I trust that my HP would be there with me and my kids.