I originally wrote this blog entry for my work on Fiveable. I misunderstood the directions and wrote an entire blog post when I was just supposed to supply a paragraph or two, and I do not think this was ever posted on their site, so I am posting it now on mine. If I ever find that it was posted on their site, I will provide a link to it here, as well. 

Feeling Vulnerable for the First Time

I was just getting settled into a good viewing spot for breakfast duty in the cafeteria before school, and this morning’s duty session didn’t seem much different than any other of the thousands of hours I have spent on duty at the high school where I have taught for 22 years. The morning ticked along quite peacefully, in fact, with students munching on toast or sharing algebra homework or showing each other a humorous video they had found on YouTube. 

With the conversations and students moving around, I didn’t see the boy fall out of his chair, but my head jerked up right away when I heard, “Mrs. Camp, come help!”. No, I didn’t see him fall out of his chair, but I did see his body writhing on the floor, wracked with an epileptic seizure.  

I ran from my seat a few tables away and shouted, “Catherine, watch my phone. The rest of y’all stand close by but don’t move him. I am going to get the nurse.” I dashed out the cafeteria doors, and as I ran toward the front office, I motioned to the teachers on duty in the commons area. “Go inside the cafeteria and help them. I am going to get a nurse.” 

Within a few minutes, our school nurses had the boy regaining consciousness, our secretaries had an ambulance called, his mom alerted, and the rest of the students had calmed a little, but I was still shaken. In fact, I wasn’t able to start class right away when the bell rang to start first block; I had to share the story with my students. Some of them had been in the cafeteria, too, and we shared our perspectives on the scary moment with those who had not been there. I had to have a minute to talk about what I had experienced and to process the scare of it all. 

I was the only teacher on duty on that side of the cafeteria that morning, but of course, about a dozen food service professionals were serving up breakfast trays and working on that day’s lunch menu. One professional trained to educate teens and a few more trained to nourish their bodies. Yet, at that moment, the weight of my responsibility as a teacher hit me in a way it never had before – educating my students is my first job, but all of us are now charged with protecting each other physically.  

A Crisis For Real

The longer I contemplated what had happened that morning, the more I thought about those who have been victims and witnesses of mass shootings, and I found myself wondering about how they handled a crisis bigger and more terrifying than any I had ever experienced in my life. The truth in America right now is that in the same three-to-four minutes it took for a child to have a seizure and send us all into crisis mode, another person may have murdered dozens of innocent people, leaving their bodies lifeless from an onslaught of bullets. As of August 7, 2019, there have been 253 mass shootings in the United States just in 2019, according to Gun Violence Archive.

Mass shootings are nearly a daily occurrence in modern America.  

Being aware of mass shootings is nothing new to me; I remember clearly when the tragedy at Columbine High School happened, and it is not as if I haven’t been trained on what to do in the circumstance of an active shooter. We practice intruder drills multiple times each year at my school, and we participated in an unplanned shooter drill the very same morning a real shooter later devastated Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, leaving 17 teenagers dead, on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2018, just a few hours after our drill. 17 teens not much different than the ones who shared the cafeteria with me that morning and who gave aid to a boy having a seizure. 

Then, in May of 2018, just a couple of months after the Parkland shooting, as I chaperoned our annual Prom Bash festival at our football stadium, another shooter murdered ten students at Santa Fe High School in Texas. I was emotionally bereft and completely confounded by the prevalence of shootings then, just like I am now, and I wrote about the irony of that day on my personal blog. I couldn’t seem to get past the dichotomy between the prom excitement and playful atmosphere at my high school in South Carolina juxtaposed with the suffering of the students in Texas.  

So, what do we do now? How do we respond to the growing threat of violence in our society? What should we do to protect our students? How do we protect ourselves and go about our lives, still going to shopping centers, to church, and to the movies?  

Doing What We Can

My school district, like countless others, is working on making our schools as secure as we can. All over America, schools have built safety vestibules where anyone who comes into the school has to check in and receive permission to enter. Schools now often sit behind sturdy fences that require keys or cards or codes for entry. Students practice intruder drills and debrief after each one, going over what went well and what they need to remember next time. Many schools have metal detectors, and often attending a sporting event anywhere means bringing a clear bag and submitting to a bag search after walking through a metal detector. And our South Carolina Superintendent of Education, Molly Spearman, has asked the state legislature to fund mental health counselors in every South Carolina school. We are doing all we know to do right now to make our schools as safe as possible for our children.  

Yet, despite all these new safeguards we have put in place, I don’t know that feeling safe is a luxury I can afford anywhere I might go now. The violence of our society has forced us all to live defensively – to watch over our shoulders wherever we walk. Terrorists with guns have found us in school, while we shop for groceries, when we go to the movies or to a concert with our friends, and even when we gather to worship our God. 

Where does that leave us, the regular folks who are just trying to go about our lives in peace?  To live defensively means to live every moment wary and without trust, imagining the worst-case scenario and planning an escape route every time we walk into a restaurant or take our kids to a ball game or pick our seat in Sunday School class.  

Now, I must stop here for just a minute. I am aware that my growing sense of loss of my personal freedom in American society comes from a place of privilege, and I know that many people here in America have been plagued by this sense of constant danger their entire lives, a constant danger that has threatened the lives of their families as far back as they can remember. Some people in the very same country where I used to feel safe have never felt safe here and have been taught by their parents and grandparents how to live defensively for generations. I do not mean to insult them with my new revelation, and I pray that as I examine the violence in America from my own perspective, I will also gain a greater understanding of their suffering.

Please forgive me if I am late at arriving at disillusionment. 

One of the new understandings I have developed as a result of this seemingly new tension in my life is how the fear affects my choices in the classroom. I find myself questioning my decisions about texts and approaches more than ever for a variety of reasons. I know that I have a duty and a need to provide my students with as diverse a literary curriculum as I can find. My students come from a diverse background, and they deserve to be represented in my class through the texts we read. In addition, as diverse as their backgrounds may be, they still have a need to examine life from various perspectives. After all, being able to see an issue from someone else’s point of view is one of the key indicators of being educated.  

In the past, I have done my best to make sure every student feels welcome in my class, and I would always make a big presentation about how all my students would respect the other students in the class regardless of their differences. My go-to statement is this: “You do not have to accept or buy into any belief or idea presented in the literature we read or in a viewpoint used in discussion, but you do have to try to understand it, and you do have to treat it and the person with dignity and respect.”  

I would even somewhat make a joke about the only ideas I would NOT tolerate in my classroom – racist ideas, Nazi propaganda, calls for criminal activity, such as violence. Ha, ha, ha, right? Doesn’t seem to be much of a joke anymore. 

It used to go without saying that ideas such as these were not acceptable. Period. Not acceptable. For anyone anywhere. And they still aren’t as far as I am concerned, but now I think about how a statement like this might play out in my classroom amid the hailstorm of violence surrounding us. 

Affecting Classroom Decisions

What if I have a student in my class who is being lured in by Nazi propaganda online and is being taught to “punish” those who disagree or to rid themselves of people they deem unacceptable according to their ideology? 

What if we are reading and discussing a book with characters of various races, and students begin to tell their own stories about racism or discrimination? Could a discussion meant for exploring various perspectives turn instead to a springboard for online bullying? 

Could an attempt to read a book written by or about someone of a different religion prompt someone else into a holy war? 

I have always had faith that my class was a safe space for academic freedom and creative expression, but now I worry that my best intentions to inspire thought and empathy might just serve as someone’s excuse for violence instead. In my classes on pedagogy, I have been taught what is best for intellectual growth; there is plenty of research to support my instructional practices. Yet, the evil that resides outside my classroom, that resides online and in our physical society, has created a perpetual threat to all of us – physically, socially, emotionally, and spiritually. I have never felt threatened or scared at my school, and I still don’t, but the hate and violence on TV and social media seem to be infiltrating nearly every other aspect of life in America. And finding safe places is more difficult than ever before. 

So, do I censor myself, my students, and/or my curriculum out of fear of what might happen? Do I limit our topics and assignments to what would be considered “safe”? What topics could be deemed safe? 

Or does censoring and sanitizing my class make the situation worse? 

I don’t have any answers, but I keep coming back to Edward R. Murrow, one of the journalists I admire as an American hero, a defender of free thought and exchange of intellectual ideas and also the subject of the movie, Good Night, and Good Luck. I have taught the movie as a supplement to our study of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, and I have taught the movie as part of a study of the First Amendment in both English and journalism classes. The movie explains how Murrow sought to expose the dishonesty and bullying tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy when America suffered through the horrors of The Red Scare in the mid-twentieth century. The movie resonates with me now more than ever. 

This battle I am experiencing within my own mind about what I need to do in my classroom reminds me of the scene in the movie where Murrow tells his team that they are going to go with the story that exposes McCarthy because “the terror is in this room.”  Since they are all censoring themselves and acting out of fear, Murrow implies that the real damage McCarthy has done is to their intellectual freedom. Like Murrow, if I want to fight the terror that has Americans everywhere looking over their shoulders and searching for exits and making escape plans, then I have to be true to my calling to educate. 

What will prevent a person with a gun from terrorizing innocent people in a public place? I don’t know, except that I know putting myself in the place of other people makes me more compassionate toward them. I also know that the more I learn about other people’s experiences, the more I care about what happens to them. Finally, I know that when I feel wanted and valued, then I am less likely to act out in anger. All of these truths mean that I must carry on, dedicated to my educational philosophy without fear, or at least, in spite of the fear. 

Fighting the Fear

In Murrow’s on-air message to America, he says, “We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the moment, unpopular. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of the Republic to abdicate his responsibility.” 

As an American teacher, I have a responsibility to my students, to our society, and to our future. I must teach for enlightenment and justice, to uphold the values of freedom, equality, and opportunity.  

Because I agree with Murrow that civilized, educated people do not have to “insist upon agreement with [another’s] political principles as a pre-condition for conversation or friendship,” I believe we can continue to engage our students in thought-provoking reading and conversation if we teach them how to do so. Yet, I still must confront the reality that my classroom in the age of daily violence will require a little more from me. 

While I must make sure all students feel safe and all ideas welcome, I must also be aware of and sensitive to the actions and needs of the disconnected or angry or brooding student, without assuming I know the reason why they feel that way. 

I have to build trust in my students so they feel comfortable with being honest with me about what they have seen or heard or about troubles they face at school, at home, or online.  

I have to be aware of how my privilege often blinds me to facts about our society that my students already know and have known for years.  

I have to listen more, offer more time for reflective writing, and tune into to their experience without judgement.  

And like Murrow said, “having searched my conscience and my files, I cannot contend that I have always been right or wise. But I have attempted to pursue the truth with some diligence and to report it….” I pray that such a pursuit brings us all as a nation to enlightenment and a dedication to change rooted in finding value in all human life.  

To us all, “Good night, and good luck.”