This is very difficult for me to share–and probably it’s just me. I need to share it in case it’s not.

All teachers, myself included, have confrontations with students. [We don’t sleep that night. At all.] When that happens, you wonder, somewhere in the back of your mind–fleetingly, because mostly you think about how badly you screwed up and how you could have handled the situation so much more effectively–if you’ve turned yourself and your kids into the next victims.

You don’t think about it every waking moment, but you certainly do when you lock the doors, close the curtains, and get them quiet for yet another lockdown drill.

And it’s not so much dying that you think about: it’s dying in such an apparently meaningless way.

I can’t imagine that my teachers ever had thoughts like mine. I also can’t imagine, with this added to the absurdity and the weight of all the expectations placed on teachers today, why any young person would want to become a teacher.

In the last few years, in the mandated anarchy of No Child Left Behind, which involved teaching to the test, and then The Common Core, which involves a curriculum of great enrichment (Not for students. For the textbook publishers who designed it),  it was the kids who saved me and my career. They kept me going.

But the shock–and, paradoxically, the monotony– of school shootings is a reality that teachers have to think about every day, and it’s poisoning our nation at its most important juncture: in the classroom, where adults and young people are supposed to be in partnership, where they are to work together to ensure that the nation has a future.

I always worked, very purposefully, to make my classroom safe for the students I loved to teach. I think I taught with high expectations, but I also wanted them to have a place–a place that belonged to them–where they would find humor, kindness, and acceptance. But neither my classroom, nor any classroom today, is a sanctuary. Not anymore.