Teachers Defending Schools?

It's been a bit since my last post, but I have continued thinking a lot about school shootings, and gun control, and all of the craziness in the media from the left and the right on the topic.

In particular, I've been thinking about everything that teachers are expected to do. It's pretty amazing, really. When I was trained as a teacher...I was trained, well, to teach. I was trained to write lesson plans. I was trained to understand different pedagogical approaches, and how to choose appropriate methods for the content I was to teach. I was trained to assess my students' learning. In my student teaching experience, I had the opportunity to practice these skills, and to learn firsthand about connecting with students, about managing a classroom, and about all sorts of pragmatic requirements of being a teacher...like navigating the line at the copier in the morning, and how to ensure that the custodian remains your friend.

But the profession has definitely changed in the 20 years since I began teaching. And teachers today are expected to perform many, many more tasks than "just teaching." One of these tasks? Apparently, teachers are now also expected to be prepared to lay down their lives defending their schools. No, seriously.

Schools and Guns and Brokenness

I've started writing this post three or four times in the past few days, and I keep walking away from it. I feel like I have to say something in response to the school shooting in Parkland, FL last week, but I just can't seem to sort out my ideas. Here's my best thinking (summarized) for now...

Our society is so broken, that it seem like people on both sides of this debate are talking past each other, shouting their slogans, not really listening, and missing the nuance of the situation. But we have to actually have a conversation about this, and that's complicated, because people have such strong feelings, brute-force logic is not going to change hearts and minds.

A little more I can say to flesh this out...but recognize that these are my opinions, and I'm thinking out loud here, though pretty sure for now...