some things are harder than others
I am happy as a pig in shit preparing for this adol lit class, at least until I get to the part of my colleague’s syllabus (which I am using as a model, since she usually teaches this class) about Columbine. Then I am stopped.
It’s been seven years. I was a mile away that day, teaching in the closest middle school, but worlds different — where suburban became urban and poor. We heard the initial reports of “firecrackers” on the news and all of a sudden we were on lockdown for the next several hours and that whole Spring became about two boys and their desire to wipe their school off the face of the earth and be anti-heroes. Columbines were no longer my favorite flower but short-hand for the gut-wrenching fear of that day when all I knew was that my principal’s daughter usually ate lunch in the Columbine cafeteria — where was she? How many dead? Who was doing the shooting and were we next?
I only taught two years before going back in to do my doctorate and, if I am really honest with myself, Columbine had a lot to do with it. I haven’t dealt with a lot of those issues — I don’t like to talk about it and I walked out of a graduation at Vandy because the keynote speaker was saying stupid things about school violence and waving Columbine around like his own personal flag. Teaching changed for me on 4/20/99 and I go between understanding what it was like to be an outcast in school (I was even spit on once by a popular girl, my school was so jock and moneypopular-centric) and wanting to dig up their graves I am so angry with those two idiots.
Am I ready to teach about this? The thing is that Columbine has become shorthand for the extremes of social hierarchies and the pain of harassment in schools. Some schools are worse than others — the suicide rate at mine was pretty high, as were transfers (no, I am not going to mention what school I went to). Kids all over the country are still holding up Harris and Klebold as icons and heroes even though those two never even went after the kids who were targeting them in the first place — I’m not even sure anymore that was their focus — and school shootings still happen. As do teasing, taunting, and harassment by popular kids and jocks where the school administration just looks the other way.
I think I need to teach about this if only because it is part of the landscape of American adolescence. When I think back in my mind to those rainy days, one of the only times it ever rained five days in a row — God cried for us in Colorado because we just couldn’t, the shock ran much too deep — I see a deep scar where sunny suburbia used to be. The earth just opened to show what lies beneath.
What I can’t do is pretend those scars aren’t there.
May 27th, 2006 at 8:52 pm
A good place to start teaching about Columbine is this blog post. But I don’t believe that you should feel you ’should’ ‘teach Columbine’. There are more ways than that to get across the issues that need to be taught …
July 3rd, 2006 at 12:37 am
I read through your blog for a variety of reasons - you mentioned some things in class I was interested in and I wanted to learn more about you. You have a sense of humor which is really refreshing in a professor.
When I read your comments on your personal experience with Columbine, I found myself reading your words and forgot to take a breath. Your words reminded me of the accounts of holocaust survivors, or the dialogue they started recording of 911 survivors and the victims’ families. It was raw and it impressed me deeply. I can see that it was life changing for you.
I read the comment made that you don’t have “to teach Columbine”. I think you bring your own emotion and experiences to teaching and Columbine is part of yours. It makes you a better teacher, it makes you human.