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jenettI've been mulling over whether to make this post for a few days, but it's one of those "need to write it to get it out of my head". (And yes, it is about school shootings in general though probably not in the way you're thinking, and I don't think there's anything significantly triggering in here: I am talking about working in schools, mostly, and the implications.)
I spent ten years working in a secondary school setting. And I started there about 15 months after Columbine. (The fall of 2000).
Most of my time there, the state mandated 5 fire drills, 5 lock down drills, and 1 tornado drill. Let me point out here that the only one we came *close* to needing in 10 years was the tornado drill.
We had a lot of really awesome, really amazing kids. (and this was a private/independent school, so we were not dealing, by and large, with kids who were doing badly there or miserably unhappy, or at least not for more than a school year.) But you need only look at the statistics about mental health, about abuse, about high pressure families, about any number of other things, to realise all the places something could go very badly, given the wrong combination of circumstances.
One of my friends has checked in with me several times this week, though, because she remembers me talking about this. About what those lock down drills do for staff - and about one of my comments about it.
I think the drills are supposed to be reassuring. And you know what? They weren't.
Because I'd look at that library, with the glass windows bracketing the doors. And I'd look at the layout of the back staircase. And I'd look at the hill behind the school, coming up to the second floor, and I'd look at the way you could use the hallways to isolate spaces.
Look, I'm a gamer. I've been a tabletop gamer since - well, before college. And I can do basic tactical analysis of that kind without thinking about it. And what I could see was all the ways that someone who knew the school could use those very drills to find the most people. Very very easily.
And the reality is that school shootings generally come from someone who knows the school. Who has access to information about the school. For individual classrooms, that's probably manageable. Sort of. As much as it's going to be. But - I was a librarian. And the picture changes there, a lot. As it does for cafeterias, and for gyms, and for public spaces of the school in general. No one talks about that.
I still can't walk into a library or a school or some other public space without doing the "which way are the exits, and what are my options?" analysis. It's wired into my brain, the same way I can't walk into a hotel without analysing what it would be like to throw a convention there. Only more so. More pervasive. More stress-inducing.
And I wonder, how many ways are we fooling ourselves, as teachers, as adults, as a society, about what's safe, and what isn't, and what does damage.
***
Let me tell you what we didn't really get.
During my time there, there were two different continuing ed sessions (both done by the school counsellor, who was awesome) on spotting possible mental health needs in students.
What shocked me, though, was how few of the faculty - and at the point both of these happened, I was the paraprofessional, not professional staff like I was at the end - actually knew. Actually paid attention on their own time.
There were exceptions in the staff, mind you. (And people were, at least, good about referring to the grade deans or counsellor, who had additional training and skills). But ... I had no idea how many adults have so little idea about the signs of depression. Or anxiety. Or early warning signs for schizophrenia (which can start showing up in high school age teens) or various other things, where early treatment can make a huge difference in the arc of someone's life.
These are people who were otherwise intelligent, engaged with the world, and all sorts of other things. They just ... there was a "Someone else's problem" field about it. It wasn't even stigma. It just didn't touch them, somehow. Even when they were aware they needed to pay attention. (This wasn't a mandatory-for-everyone workshop, so the people there more or less wanted to be.)
And there there was me, who has friends or acquaintances with a wide variety of diagnoses (just as I have friends with a wide variety of physical health diagnoses) and spending time in communities where talking about them is somewhere between "Yeah, we do, because it can help" and "It's actually necessary information to plan things that work for everyone involved" (some varieties of Pagan stuff I do.) And I sat there, wondering, what kind of world they actually live in.
***
As you can guess by the dates, I was also working there on 9/11.
And it's one of the reasons I do not own a TV these days. And haven't for seven years. Not the only reason. (Some are practical, some have been financial, some have been 'living in small spaces'.)
But I spent most of that day with the TV projected on one of the library walls. And these days, it's why I avoid crisis reporting like the plague. Radio. Reading news reports. If I absolutely need to see something visually, watching it briefly and putting it away. Not getting dragged into massive conversations online about it.
It's not good for me. I'm pretty sure it's not good for most people, but I am not Queen of the Universe.
Here's the thing, though. Schools are pretty lousy about educating teachers (and related staff) about how to deal with these kinds of stresses. We had vague noises after 9/11 about "If you're having trouble coping, you can talk to [counsellor] or the Employee Assistance Program"
But let's remember that this is the same school that threw *fits* at me for taking time off for a specialist medical appointment in the middle of the day (and that, in general, made leaving the building during the day difficult, even for faculty with a free period). That we all liked our counsellor and knew she was doing a lot to help the kids.
That people in helping professions tend not to want to burden other people in helping professions, especially when we know they're overworked and overbooked.
(And we were lucky: we had a full-time counsellor. In comparison, we had a nurse two half-days a week. A lot of places don't have someone full time who has any kind of substantial training in mental health issues.)
And we all had a lot of other stuff that needed to get done.
And so everything sort of cludges along, in a lot of places. Without looking at the larger issues. Or the general need for support. Or education. Or information. Until the next thing that looks like a crisis.
***
I'm not sure what the answer is. Again, I'm not Queen of the Universe. I think education, information, space and time to think past today, tomorrow, next week, next standardised exam, is a good start. But that's sort of obvious, isn't it?
The thing that bugs me the most about the conversations I am seeing, is an utter lack of ability to grasp what the realities of schools are - even the best and the brightest and the most well-managed of them.
Here's three, to get started:
1) Even in places with concealed carry laws, schools reliably exempt themselves and forbid concealed carry on their property.
This is for lots of reasons, but one of the most fundamental is that teachers are in and out of different spaces *all the time*, and that short of carrying something on one's actual person (which has a lot of problematic considerations for a lot of people, and especially if working with younger students still learning the concept of personal space), there are few really secure places to put things.
(We went through this with computers all the time. Guns are more complicated by magnitudes.)
Teachers share classrooms, kids migrate between spaces, you have issues if there's a sub, or a special program, or any number of other things that are surprisingly common in the course of a given month of school.
There are solutions to these things, but realistically, they take budget, planning, long-term thinking, and a lot more to work on. And personally, I'd rather see those things go into better training for staff. Better support for students. Better education on a whole lot of things.
2) Even in places with relatively good training about student (and related) mental health concerns, there are a lot of possible gaps.
Sometimes these are for the best possible reasons, like student confidentiality. (For example, classroom teachers often had access to a lot of information that I, as a librarian, would only even be vaguely told about if that student were in my homeroom.)
And on some levels, I agree with that. But then I think back to the kid who talked, late in his senior year, about massive depression, and why he wondered why no one reached out to him. And how I'd seen him in the library, and ... if I'd known that other people were worried about him, I might have pushed a little more against his "I am alone against the world" than I did.
I don't know. There's some things that haunt me, and that's one of them. (He's doing okay, last I heard, but he might not have, y'know?)
Sometimes they're because people are human, and you think you've told someone about X, and really, you only thought you did. And y'know, people are human, and this happens.
And sometimes they're because a situation doesn't fit into tidy little labels, and you spend a lot of time going "I'm not sure if this is just a weirdness or a Thing That Needs Attention." It's really really hard to live your life in that space, but teachers do it all the time. But it does make it harder to share information as needed.
And finally, as noted, there's a lot of adults in a school who interact with a particular student, but who don't necessarily get pulled into conversations about them. Library and technology staff. Cafeteria staff. Coaches for sports if they don't work at the school. Extracurricular leaders, ditto. And at most schools, there isn't a really good mechanism for that at all. It all relies on a clutch of people remembering to tell other people, about something that might or might not be an issue.
What I'm saying is that it's really good in an obvious crisis - "X's father died in a car crash last night." or "Y's mother is about to die of cancer." It's a lot less good in more nebulous settings.
3) That even when you've got a Thing That Needs Attention, it's really hard (without clear guidance and regular reminders from the school and the administration, and administrative support to follow through) for many staff to know if they should speak up. Do something. What would be useful.
There are ways to solve this one. But a lot of schools don't do it. And honestly, a lot of schools *can't* do it - they don't have the resources, and the resources they have are focused on the crisis points. Long-term planning takes a certain amount of time to sort through not just right now, but what might be an issue down the road.
And there's also a need for staff self-care, and .. yeah, that's a problem, in a time of tight budgets and fewer staff, and more duties, and everything that goes with that. But people who are stressed and trying to get 60 hours of work done in 50, tend not to look up from what they're doing and see the glimpses of a forming problem. Sometimes you do. Sometimes you don't.
I wish we could do better than 'sometimes'.
And there's so very little aftercare, or discussion about what worked, and what helped, and how to do more of that in the future.
***
These days, I'm an academic librarian. There's still issues, though at least I've got a better grasp on what I'm supposed to act on. What I can act on, without other people throwing fits at me for overstepping my bounds.
(As one of the MLIS librarians - our management team - I have a pretty explicit directive that making choices that make the library a safe, functional, accessible place to be while obeying necessary laws is the goal, and if I have to make a choice on the fly, and aim for that, my director will back me.)
But in the past 15 months, I've had one issue where I was asked to make sure someone stuck around until our campus police could come talk to him. Which, let me tell you, is not a topic commonly covered in library school.
And there's a handful of our patrons (we are open to the general community as well as to the campus: there are many things I like about that, but it has some complications) who, yes, creep me out a bit. Who make me very glad there's always two people in the building.
(And yet, in the late evenings, one of those two people is a student. Our student workers are great, but there's a lot of stuff they don't know about the world, too.)
And it's hard to know what one does about that. In practice, one doesn't, you just keep an eye out, and pass on info if you see something odd. But I'm not sure that the practice is good enough. And yet, I'm not sure what would be.
Living in community is hard. And it'd be easier if we talked more about the gaps and the spaces where doing too much too long is making us miss things. Dangerous, scary, life-altering things.
So why aren't we?
I spent ten years working in a secondary school setting. And I started there about 15 months after Columbine. (The fall of 2000).
Most of my time there, the state mandated 5 fire drills, 5 lock down drills, and 1 tornado drill. Let me point out here that the only one we came *close* to needing in 10 years was the tornado drill.
We had a lot of really awesome, really amazing kids. (and this was a private/independent school, so we were not dealing, by and large, with kids who were doing badly there or miserably unhappy, or at least not for more than a school year.) But you need only look at the statistics about mental health, about abuse, about high pressure families, about any number of other things, to realise all the places something could go very badly, given the wrong combination of circumstances.
One of my friends has checked in with me several times this week, though, because she remembers me talking about this. About what those lock down drills do for staff - and about one of my comments about it.
I think the drills are supposed to be reassuring. And you know what? They weren't.
Because I'd look at that library, with the glass windows bracketing the doors. And I'd look at the layout of the back staircase. And I'd look at the hill behind the school, coming up to the second floor, and I'd look at the way you could use the hallways to isolate spaces.
Look, I'm a gamer. I've been a tabletop gamer since - well, before college. And I can do basic tactical analysis of that kind without thinking about it. And what I could see was all the ways that someone who knew the school could use those very drills to find the most people. Very very easily.
And the reality is that school shootings generally come from someone who knows the school. Who has access to information about the school. For individual classrooms, that's probably manageable. Sort of. As much as it's going to be. But - I was a librarian. And the picture changes there, a lot. As it does for cafeterias, and for gyms, and for public spaces of the school in general. No one talks about that.
I still can't walk into a library or a school or some other public space without doing the "which way are the exits, and what are my options?" analysis. It's wired into my brain, the same way I can't walk into a hotel without analysing what it would be like to throw a convention there. Only more so. More pervasive. More stress-inducing.
And I wonder, how many ways are we fooling ourselves, as teachers, as adults, as a society, about what's safe, and what isn't, and what does damage.
***
Let me tell you what we didn't really get.
During my time there, there were two different continuing ed sessions (both done by the school counsellor, who was awesome) on spotting possible mental health needs in students.
What shocked me, though, was how few of the faculty - and at the point both of these happened, I was the paraprofessional, not professional staff like I was at the end - actually knew. Actually paid attention on their own time.
There were exceptions in the staff, mind you. (And people were, at least, good about referring to the grade deans or counsellor, who had additional training and skills). But ... I had no idea how many adults have so little idea about the signs of depression. Or anxiety. Or early warning signs for schizophrenia (which can start showing up in high school age teens) or various other things, where early treatment can make a huge difference in the arc of someone's life.
These are people who were otherwise intelligent, engaged with the world, and all sorts of other things. They just ... there was a "Someone else's problem" field about it. It wasn't even stigma. It just didn't touch them, somehow. Even when they were aware they needed to pay attention. (This wasn't a mandatory-for-everyone workshop, so the people there more or less wanted to be.)
And there there was me, who has friends or acquaintances with a wide variety of diagnoses (just as I have friends with a wide variety of physical health diagnoses) and spending time in communities where talking about them is somewhere between "Yeah, we do, because it can help" and "It's actually necessary information to plan things that work for everyone involved" (some varieties of Pagan stuff I do.) And I sat there, wondering, what kind of world they actually live in.
***
As you can guess by the dates, I was also working there on 9/11.
And it's one of the reasons I do not own a TV these days. And haven't for seven years. Not the only reason. (Some are practical, some have been financial, some have been 'living in small spaces'.)
But I spent most of that day with the TV projected on one of the library walls. And these days, it's why I avoid crisis reporting like the plague. Radio. Reading news reports. If I absolutely need to see something visually, watching it briefly and putting it away. Not getting dragged into massive conversations online about it.
It's not good for me. I'm pretty sure it's not good for most people, but I am not Queen of the Universe.
Here's the thing, though. Schools are pretty lousy about educating teachers (and related staff) about how to deal with these kinds of stresses. We had vague noises after 9/11 about "If you're having trouble coping, you can talk to [counsellor] or the Employee Assistance Program"
But let's remember that this is the same school that threw *fits* at me for taking time off for a specialist medical appointment in the middle of the day (and that, in general, made leaving the building during the day difficult, even for faculty with a free period). That we all liked our counsellor and knew she was doing a lot to help the kids.
That people in helping professions tend not to want to burden other people in helping professions, especially when we know they're overworked and overbooked.
(And we were lucky: we had a full-time counsellor. In comparison, we had a nurse two half-days a week. A lot of places don't have someone full time who has any kind of substantial training in mental health issues.)
And we all had a lot of other stuff that needed to get done.
And so everything sort of cludges along, in a lot of places. Without looking at the larger issues. Or the general need for support. Or education. Or information. Until the next thing that looks like a crisis.
***
I'm not sure what the answer is. Again, I'm not Queen of the Universe. I think education, information, space and time to think past today, tomorrow, next week, next standardised exam, is a good start. But that's sort of obvious, isn't it?
The thing that bugs me the most about the conversations I am seeing, is an utter lack of ability to grasp what the realities of schools are - even the best and the brightest and the most well-managed of them.
Here's three, to get started:
1) Even in places with concealed carry laws, schools reliably exempt themselves and forbid concealed carry on their property.
This is for lots of reasons, but one of the most fundamental is that teachers are in and out of different spaces *all the time*, and that short of carrying something on one's actual person (which has a lot of problematic considerations for a lot of people, and especially if working with younger students still learning the concept of personal space), there are few really secure places to put things.
(We went through this with computers all the time. Guns are more complicated by magnitudes.)
Teachers share classrooms, kids migrate between spaces, you have issues if there's a sub, or a special program, or any number of other things that are surprisingly common in the course of a given month of school.
There are solutions to these things, but realistically, they take budget, planning, long-term thinking, and a lot more to work on. And personally, I'd rather see those things go into better training for staff. Better support for students. Better education on a whole lot of things.
2) Even in places with relatively good training about student (and related) mental health concerns, there are a lot of possible gaps.
Sometimes these are for the best possible reasons, like student confidentiality. (For example, classroom teachers often had access to a lot of information that I, as a librarian, would only even be vaguely told about if that student were in my homeroom.)
And on some levels, I agree with that. But then I think back to the kid who talked, late in his senior year, about massive depression, and why he wondered why no one reached out to him. And how I'd seen him in the library, and ... if I'd known that other people were worried about him, I might have pushed a little more against his "I am alone against the world" than I did.
I don't know. There's some things that haunt me, and that's one of them. (He's doing okay, last I heard, but he might not have, y'know?)
Sometimes they're because people are human, and you think you've told someone about X, and really, you only thought you did. And y'know, people are human, and this happens.
And sometimes they're because a situation doesn't fit into tidy little labels, and you spend a lot of time going "I'm not sure if this is just a weirdness or a Thing That Needs Attention." It's really really hard to live your life in that space, but teachers do it all the time. But it does make it harder to share information as needed.
And finally, as noted, there's a lot of adults in a school who interact with a particular student, but who don't necessarily get pulled into conversations about them. Library and technology staff. Cafeteria staff. Coaches for sports if they don't work at the school. Extracurricular leaders, ditto. And at most schools, there isn't a really good mechanism for that at all. It all relies on a clutch of people remembering to tell other people, about something that might or might not be an issue.
What I'm saying is that it's really good in an obvious crisis - "X's father died in a car crash last night." or "Y's mother is about to die of cancer." It's a lot less good in more nebulous settings.
3) That even when you've got a Thing That Needs Attention, it's really hard (without clear guidance and regular reminders from the school and the administration, and administrative support to follow through) for many staff to know if they should speak up. Do something. What would be useful.
There are ways to solve this one. But a lot of schools don't do it. And honestly, a lot of schools *can't* do it - they don't have the resources, and the resources they have are focused on the crisis points. Long-term planning takes a certain amount of time to sort through not just right now, but what might be an issue down the road.
And there's also a need for staff self-care, and .. yeah, that's a problem, in a time of tight budgets and fewer staff, and more duties, and everything that goes with that. But people who are stressed and trying to get 60 hours of work done in 50, tend not to look up from what they're doing and see the glimpses of a forming problem. Sometimes you do. Sometimes you don't.
I wish we could do better than 'sometimes'.
And there's so very little aftercare, or discussion about what worked, and what helped, and how to do more of that in the future.
***
These days, I'm an academic librarian. There's still issues, though at least I've got a better grasp on what I'm supposed to act on. What I can act on, without other people throwing fits at me for overstepping my bounds.
(As one of the MLIS librarians - our management team - I have a pretty explicit directive that making choices that make the library a safe, functional, accessible place to be while obeying necessary laws is the goal, and if I have to make a choice on the fly, and aim for that, my director will back me.)
But in the past 15 months, I've had one issue where I was asked to make sure someone stuck around until our campus police could come talk to him. Which, let me tell you, is not a topic commonly covered in library school.
And there's a handful of our patrons (we are open to the general community as well as to the campus: there are many things I like about that, but it has some complications) who, yes, creep me out a bit. Who make me very glad there's always two people in the building.
(And yet, in the late evenings, one of those two people is a student. Our student workers are great, but there's a lot of stuff they don't know about the world, too.)
And it's hard to know what one does about that. In practice, one doesn't, you just keep an eye out, and pass on info if you see something odd. But I'm not sure that the practice is good enough. And yet, I'm not sure what would be.
Living in community is hard. And it'd be easier if we talked more about the gaps and the spaces where doing too much too long is making us miss things. Dangerous, scary, life-altering things.
So why aren't we?
no subject
Date: 2012-12-18 09:20 pm (UTC)Every time public awareness shifts to "let's pay attention to behavioral warning signs!" that translates to "let's harass all those loners because not wanting social contact is creepy!"
Every time public awareness focuses on bullying in schools, that translates to "find the kids being bullied, and tell them to stop doing whatever weirdo freak things are making them into targets."
(On my more cynical days, I blame monotheism for all of this... the notion that there is One Ultimate Truth, and anyone who's not following it is wrong and deserves whatever troubles come to them. Most of the time, I know that's not it. Or at least, not all of it.)
I am aware that there is not, and isn't going to be, better lockdown for schools. Ever. Short of treating all public schools like military prison academies, there is no way to get the kind of security that would prevent the mass shootings. They're done by people who know the school, who know how to bypass whatever meager security measures are put in place. We are not going to have armed guards at all school entrances (please, allow me to keep believing this), so someone with a gun will always be able to blast their way in and do hideous amounts of damage before being stopped/killing themselves.
Remove gun access (whole different swarm of problems, there), and they'll switch to bombs. Less certainty of killing; also less certainty of identifying and apprehending the perpetrator. (We don't need less guns for this problem. We need less messages of "take down all your enemies" sent to young privileged boys.)
it'd be easier if we talked more about the gaps and the spaces where doing too much too long is making us miss things. Dangerous, scary, life-altering things.
Yes. We have several problems:
1) Lack of training in basic logic, including threat assessment. People believe child abduction is a constant and high danger; they don't believe letting their teenager drive a car on the freeway is a constant and high danger.
2) Nuclear family fallout: Each family is supposed to contain its own problems and solutions, and those families are supposed to contain two parents, 2+ kids, and a couple of aunts/uncles/cousins as more distant resources. Families without those resources are trying to juggle attention in more directions than is possible. Parents *cannot* be the only ones watching their kids' behavior; they need feedback from others to know how those kids act away from parents. And we've removed all the older feedback routes and not replaced them with anything. Specifically, we've removed almost all non-authority adult contact from most kids' lives.
3) Ostrich Syndrome: if we pretend the problem doesn't exist, it will go away.
That one's insidious, because it's mostly true. Kids will go through mood swings and rearrange friendships and gain and drop hobbies on a whim, and mostly, it doesn't matter if they're being watched or not. Many, many potential problems evaporate with time and no action whatsoever.
And a whole lot of people think that if that's true 95% of the time, the other 5% are weird exotic outliers that shouldn't exist, rather than being the reason for having intervention policies. (95% or more of the time, if you slip on a stair, you right yourself and nothing happens. That other fraction, you fall down and break something. This does not mean it's okay to leave handrails off 95% of staircases.)
Some time ago, schools stopped being "community institutions" and became "government institutions." Their rules are arranged as if everyone working and attending are complete strangers with no legal or social ties to each other. And sometimes, that's the case. But the rules have no allowances for situations where that's not true, and no tolerance for staff attempting to make a community out of the school, except on the most superficial level.
And because the acting premise is "all staff and students shall have only professional relationships," there's no mechanism for students to seek help for problems among the only non-parent adults most of them spend any time with, and no way for staffers to share what little bits of information they have to collaborate to provide help.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-18 11:25 pm (UTC)But there's also only so much that teachers who are getting to school at 5am and there until 4pm are going to spot. (Or the ones who got there at 7, and brought a couple of hours of work home.) And heavens help you if you had a family issue that took more brain cycles than a usual year.
In a functional system, one or two out of seven teachers being less observant in a given year (for whatever reason: they're new to the school and working their tails off getting used to it, they have a baby at home, their parents are needing lots of elder care attention, they or their spouse has a lasting health issue that's taking time and concentration to manage), because you'd have a lot of spare people spotting things.
But I honestly think, in a lot of places, you're losing those. And not just to "You must be professional", but to just plain not having brain space or time for even the completely appropriate interactions to unfurl.
And I really don't know how you begin to fix that one.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-18 10:44 pm (UTC)My school had a lockdown drill on Thursday, the day before the shooting. We locked the door to my classroom, covered the single window, and moved down and away from it. The students were skeptical that it would help. The freshmen were enthusiastic about more active offense. My colleagues seemed to be skeptical that it would work at all. The kids in the glass-walled cafeteria didn't even go into the smaller (and more defensible?) faculty lunchroom. They wouldn't have fit anyway. This especially made students skeptical about the usefulness.
I just spent a weekend on a spiritual retreat with students, where in the final night, students share all the burdens they've been carrying around, and we offer advice and support to each other. All kinds of things come out you'd never have known, whether it's depression or other mental/physical illness or just tremendous home drama. My colleagues are, for the most part, deeply attached to that separation between students and faculty that you call professionalism when you want to hide behind it. They say it's inappropriate. They point out that it's a risky venue where you relate intimately with students; it doesn't help that we had a (creepy) faculty member dismissed midway through last year for totally inappropriate conduct on the retreat. My colleagues who have gone say it's deeply moving but they don't have the time. They don't have the training to deal with the issues the kids have.
They don't realize that Guidance doesn't have the training either. That Guidance is here dealing with the kind of problems you can solve by bringing kids' parents in and talking to teachers, because they prefer to deal with straightforward academic problems than real ones. I've basically heard as much from Guidance. What can they do? If a kid is passing their classes, who will even notice? Guidance worries about kids who are failing. Guidance can't fix real problems.
I love the retreat because it feels like deep therapy. Because it's all some of these kids will get. But it's not until senior year, and there is so much brokenness before that.
(I work at a religious independent school, for context.)
no subject
Date: 2012-12-18 11:30 pm (UTC)And you make the excellent point that - if you can't build caring, emotionally supportive non-parental adult community models at a religious independent school, I don't think *any* school has a chance. (Because the religious piece gives you - or should give you - some models of ideal behaviour to start with, rather than having to wrangle it from square one.)
there's also a whole thing in here for me about how teaching (and learning) should involve risk, but we've built systems in which even a tiny failure is seen as unacceptable. Not "abuse of students" failure, but "I reached out to this student, and it was messy and awkward for a few days, and then it got better and they found someone they could talk to, and I got more training in how to do it better next time."
Because that kind of thing is a kind of humanity I think people need to learn. And it doesn't have any space in a lot of schools (and other cultures-of-place) anymore.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-19 02:08 am (UTC)And honestly, I often don't have time either. I calculated it once and I have 2.5 hrs per student per year for every single thing a student might need. There are kids I basically steal time from in order to use it with students who seem to need it more (or whose parents are more freaking demanding and must have a 2 hr meeting every freaking month). If we really want schools safer, we need to reduce the number of students that teachers have each day, we need more general counselors, and we need people who just do therapy in schools and we need to staff the counselors and therapists so that they have EXTRA time so they can investigate things that seem off, not just crisis manage all the time.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-19 03:14 am (UTC)That school had much smaller classes, but there's still only so much time people can manage when you're seeing 80ish kids a day, and when you have a bunch of other outside-the-classroom expectations - meetings, departmental commitments, etc. etc. etc. And there *has* to be space (both physically and in the course of the day) for casual interactions with teachers, not just in the classroom - which means either not sharing classrooms (so teachers can use them for various things) or having a well-designed school.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-19 06:24 am (UTC)Hell, we discovered cutlery today behind some books, and it frightened a lot of the staff. For good reason - it's a nice open space, and it would be easy to stab someone, staff or user, with that hidden weapon if things ever got horribly heated.
Some of the staff is trained on evacuation procedure and the like, but if someone came in shooting, it would probably be mass casualties, even if other people had weapons and were perfectly accurate with them in high-stress situations.
We need people who can help people that might be considering mass violence. If we can't manage that, there isn't enough legislation on guns that can fix the problem.