“Can a podium stop a bullet?”: teaching in the age of mass shootings

I started writing this after the shooting at Umpqua Community College. But I could have written it after Columbine. Or Virginia Tech or Sandy Hook, or any other small town made synonymous with the ghastly gun murders of innocent students, teachers, and administrators that happened there. I could have written it after three people were murdered during a showing of Trainwreck this summer, or after the massacres in Paris and Beirut last month.

As it happens, I am finishing it now, in the wake of another mass shooting, this time in San Bernardino. I heard the news three minutes before teaching my second-to-last class of the semester at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston, Massachusetts. I had no time to process, and I didn't want to distract my students with the news in case they hadn't heard. During short periods when the class worked on writing exercises, I snuck peeks at my phone under my desk.

It's my fifth year teaching writing and literature at Bunker Hill, a college of 18,000 students. Good Will Hunting was set and filmed here. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who would be killed by police in 2013 after bombing the Boston Marathon, spent two years here before dropping out to study boxing.

I love my students. Every semester I'm blown away by their dedication, creativity, brilliance, and resilience. Many of my pupils are parents working full-time jobs, and immigrants from other countries who have survived wars, poverty, abuse, incarceration, and natural disasters. All of them matriculate because they hope and believe that a college education will improve their lives or the lives of their children. Many of them are the first in their family to go to college, or even to graduate from high school.

In years past, I have arrived in September fascinated to discover who is sitting in my class — what stories they'll tell of their experiences and longings. But this fall I found myself scanning the room of new students, 25 pairs of eyes staring at me, trying to figure out if anyone looked unstable, angry, too cloistered in his head, too much of a loner. Who would be likely to snap if given a bad grade, if called upon too much or not enough, or for reasons I couldn't anticipate?

The worry didn't lessen as the semester wore on. Fueled by constant news of shootings in this country and abroad, I taught my lessons while remaining hypervigilant about any student who was too quiet, or seemed emotionally volatile, or reached too slowly or too quickly for his bag, inside his jacket. I scrutinized the room for somewhere I could duck, somewhere I could hide the most students. Behind the podium? Under that far desk? In the metal supply closet? It's hard to teach when the mind drifts too readily from analyzing an introductory paragraph or probing a Neruda poem to, How could I survive? Is the podium thick enough to stop a bullet? Would the big, quiet guy who sits near the door tackle a shooter in the doorway?

I've always been prone to worry; before the Boston Marathon bombing and the horrifying rash of mass shootings at schools, tragedies such as these were ones I imagined vividly and feared but talked myself out of in order to live a full life. Except lately, reality has proven that my worst fears can and do happen. And randomly. And often. For an anxiety-prone person, this is fuel for the fire. Pushing open the heavy glass doors of school the morning after San Bernardino, I pondered how my friends and family would cope if I were a casualty of a shooting. I thought about my almost-finished book and how much I want to complete it. I prayed that a murderer wouldn't deprive me of that chance. Every face I passed in the hallway was the face of my potential murderer, or savior. Instead of mentally preparing for the discussion about feminism in late-1950s Chicago as it related to A Raisin in the Sun, I assured myself that chances were I'd be safe today, that I'd teach my class and walk out alive. Still, I couldn't help but see the fluorescent-lit hallways slick with blood.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that there have been 351 mass shootings in the 334 days of 2015. By a common definition, to qualify as a mass shooting at least four people must be killed. In 2015, America has lost, at minimum, 1,400 lives to mass shootings, which is roughly 10 times the body count in Paris — which is surely a lowball, which certainly does not include anyone murdered by a gun in the company of two or fewer fellow victims. Between 2001 and 2013, guns have killed more people (including homicides, suicides, and accidents) in the US than wars, AIDS, illegal drugs, and terrorism combined.

There are no locks on the doors of our rooms, and no metal detectors at any of the entrances to the school — the costs of all these things are well beyond what the school can afford. We arrive to teach and learn each day hoping that our school won't be the next on the news, that our colleagues and students, and ourselves, won't be the next faces in the paper.

Mass shootings are tragic anywhere. At movie theaters and malls, they shock and terrorize people out of their leisure into a bloody reality. But to make targets of schools is particularly cruel and bewildering. Schools are places where people strive to learn and better themselves and their lives, often at huge financial and familial sacrifice, where people learn, as early as kindergarten, to use words instead of fists, where students work toward a future that was unavailable to their parents and grandparents. They've come to school after being released from prison, after seeing friends die of overdoses and street violence, after fleeing native countries — to have their futures snatched from them with the click of a trigger, in a place of so much earnest striving, seems an especially brutal and ironic devastation.

I teach personal narrative, and the essays of many of my students read like first-person accounts of the late-20th-century horror. A Haitian refugee recounts searching for relatives in the rubble after the earthquake; a young man describes fighting as child soldier in Sierra Leone; an older Russian woman writes about watching relatives die from radiation exposure near Chernobyl. It's heartbreaking to correct the grammar and paragraph structure of these accounts, to ask for a clearer thesis statement or a less redundant concluding paragraph. But it's even more heartbreaking to think that these remarkable people might be victims of a more senseless and preventable violence, here in the erstwhile promised land.

Gila Lyons's work has appeared in Salon, the Rumpus, the Millions, Tablet, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter.

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