NRA Newtown response: National program to place armed security in schools (Yahoo! News)

One of the most vivid memories of my teaching career came a few days before I taught my first composition class as a graduate assistant at the University of Toledo. I’d been a research assistant my first year, but for some reason I was put in the meeting with the second-year TAs before the start of the term despite my lack of practical teaching experience. We brought our planned syllabi to the meeting, and after an opening discussion we were split up to have senior faculty look over our syllabi and make suggestions. I’d hoped the little jokes I’d put in my syllabus (“Syllabus is Latin for ‘that important sheet of paper your instructor gives you the first day of class that you inevitably lose two weeks later’,” “Our textbook is The Little, Brown Compact Handbook, which is neither little nor brown nor compact”) would be a nice touch, but my faculty reviewer didn’t laugh.

Indeed, he was visibly perturbed by my policy on cell phones, which said students didn’t have to turn them off during class, just put them on silent and go out in the hallway to answer a call. A few years later universities started using text messaging as a way to contact students about important university news (campus closings and the like), but back then it was a standard procedure to insist students turn off their phones during class to avoid distracting the instructor. As the faculty member tried to insist that I couldn’t let students do this, I pointed out to him that I’d had an occasion in my undergraduate career to need my cell phone on: During a late-night class where the instructor had no “cell phones off” rule, I got a call from my family about a nasty slip-and-fall accident my sister had just had in our driveway on a very icy night. Based on that, I didn’t believe it was right to insist on students turning their cell phones off during class because their phones do have legitimate emergency purposes.

He squirmed as I said this, probably because he didn’t have an easy response to my anecdote. What he said next, though, has stuck with me all these years: “Sean, if you give these kids an inch, they’ll find a way to abuse it.”

I shut up at that point because I didn’t want to make a scene, but now I kind of wish that I had. All I could think at that point was, “I haven’t even met these people yet, and you’re telling me to distrust them? How can I possibly teach them if I don’t give them some trust in the classroom? How can I expect them to trust me if I don’t show them some trust first?” I haven’t talked about this incident very much, but it’s one of the most influential moments in both my graduate school career and my teaching career. Part of the reason I’ve pursued teaching over the years is because I had so many bad teachers growing up that I want to do what I can to make sure the students of today and tomorrow don’t have to deal with as much of the crap I had to deal with when I was in school, and teach them to recognize and deal with the bad teachers they may have in the future. (I encourage my students to practice this with me; as hard as I try, I have my bad moments, so I tell my students to call me out when I’m confusing them or boring them or just ticking them off.)

After graduate school I taught at a community college in Michigan for a few years. During my first year there my father died quite suddenly and unexpectedly. My students responded by bringing cards and flowers for me and my mother, and a small group of them even stayed after class through the rest of the term just so I’d have someone to talk with as I processed my grief and all the other feelings I was dealing with. When students stay after class voluntarily, you have to be doing something right. As horrible as my father’s death was, I still think of that as the best semester of teaching I’ve ever done because it validated, at least to me, my belief that you should treat others the way you want to be treated. I treated those students, as I treat all my students, with respect and kindness and sympathy, and they returned all of those things and more to me when I was in my darkest hour. Many of those students from that momentous term remain my friends to this day.

Whether at a university or a kindergarten, or anywhere in between, students look at their surroundings for guidance on how to act and behave. Although they’re more likely to emulate their peers, we teachers, and administrators and other authority figures as well, can play a part in this crucial aspect of students’ development. By providing a welcoming and inclusive classroom atmosphere, where trust is given freely and power dynamics are minimized, students can explore themselves and their communities with the critical thinking skills they’re taught, and the result is a transformative classroom that treats the student like an actual human being, not merely an empty vessel for teachers to “dump” knowledge into. In classrooms where the teacher just impersonally goes through the lesson plans in the teacher’s edition of the textbook, or overtly denigrates students and devalues their experiences, students are sent the message that they simply don’t matter, and the results of this kind of treatment should go without saying. This holds particularly true for younger students, as they haven’t had the life experiences to be able to judge how they’re being treated and know when those who hold power over them, like teachers, are misusing and abusing their authority.

I’m finding it hard to think of anything that could possibly be worse for young students’ development than to have to go to a school where guards are walking around with firearms.

One of my sister’s favourite songs to play in my pre-school years was the Boomtown Rats’ “I Don’t Like Mondays,” so I was all too aware of the horrors that could happen at school before I even went there. School violence and gun violence are problems that will never go away completely, but they can be ameliorated to an extent. Putting armed guards in schools will likely prevent a handful of school shootings — given how many of them end in the shooters committing suicide, I doubt the guards are as effective a deterrent as the far right would lead us to believe — but do we really want the consequences that would come from having generations of children going to schools where they see armed guards every day they go to school, and being sent the message that the world is such a dangerous place that they can’t even go to school without needing armed protection?

Let us not fool ourselves into thinking that Wayne LaPierre’s speech today on behalf of the NRA in the wake of the Connecticut school shooting was anything less than the most tactless of marketing speeches. How much money does the firearms industry stand to make if armed guards are posted in every school across America? LaPierre paid a modicum of lip service to the issue of mental health, but the very same conservatives who are the NRA’s core defenders are the same people responsible for the laws and the cultural climate that have created a lot of our current national mental health crisis.

Let’s start with the NRA and its surrogates force-feeding us this slippery slope argument that any kind of gun regulation will lead to the Second Amendment being revoked and President Obama taking away everyone’s guns and the United Nations’ black helicopters patrolling America from sea to shining sea. If you or I go to a drugstore here in America and try to buy a box of cold pills, we have to show photo identification and our purchase is nationally tracked to make sure we’re not running a secret meth lab somewhere. The Aurora, Colorado movie theatre shooter this summer bought over five thousand rounds of ammunition online and no one, least of all the federal government, had a clue until it was too late. Yes, people will find ways to get around a tracking system if we start tracking gun and ammunition sales (just like they’re doing now with cold pills), but the point is we’re not even trying. The fact that cold pills are tracked more stringently than guns and bullets in America should be evidence enough that this whole country has a mental health issue.

Speaking of mental health, as so many have pointed out this past week, it’s a lot easier to get firearms in this country than mental health. Tens of millions of people can’t even afford health insurance, let alone the additional costs of mental health care. If you are lucky enough to have a health care insurer who will cover your mental health condition, all too often they will only give you the money for pills and other medicines for your condition. For many, this only treats a symptom and not an underlying problem; many people need counseling to treat their problems, but counseling costs more than pills and insurance companies would rather give their executives lavish bonuses than actually give their customers the treatment they need (and any attempt to make these insurers responsible to their customers is immediately decried as socialism by the right-wing media machine). When a person can’t afford the medication any longer because they lose their job, or they have a financial emergency, their underlying problem comes right back and they likely won’t have a sufficient way to cope with it.

More to the point, these are the same people who continue to perpetuate a culture of misery in this country, raising an army of followers to spread the idea that because their religion teaches them that they have to be miserable, then that means those of us who don’t follow their beliefs have to be miserable as well. They shout from the hilltops that difference is wrong, and do everything they can to make people bad for being different, from schoolyard taunting and bullying to laws preventing people from marrying the ones they love. Mass media, eager to promote a conflict because people will follow it and they can make more money selling advertising in their coverage, are all too complicit in perpetuating the fights and the false dichotomies. If people weren’t so depressed and angry from being told that they’re wrong or immoral or evil because they don’t follow a certain narrow religious view (that calls itself Christianity even though it’s almost completely divorced from the actual teachings of Jesus Christ), maybe fewer of them would feel the need to get their revenge by hurting or killing others.

As far as the whole “violent video games caused this” nonsense, I’ll let The Cynical Brit speak for me on that:

This is not to say that the world isn’t a dangerous place; it certainly is (especially America), and it is important that students be taught that. I refuse to believe that the world has to be as dangerous of a place as it is now, though, and unless we show students other possibilities — teaching them to question their assumptions, the things they’ve been taught by those around them — then we are, with our silence, reinforcing the status quo and the idea that nothing can be changed and it’s useless to even try. If we don’t give our young people the message that things can get better, if we don’t teach them the skills they need to recognize the need for change and implement that change, then we are dooming them, and generations to come, to follow the same path that led to the Sandy Hook massacre. The first step in empowering those young people to make those changes is to provide them with an environment of tolerance and trust. I can’t think of anything that would destroy a young student’s sense of trust than going to a school with armed guards patrolling the buildings.

Putting armed guards in classrooms would only create more problems than it could ever solve. Americans, young and old alike, deserve better.