Despite my better judgement, I have been reading The Washington Post news articles and comments about the shooting in Michigan. People keep asking why the school didn’t do more. I wish the answers were simple. This is not a day I am supposed to post, and you probably do not want to know.

My husband has repeatedly commented that I “dodged a bullet” when I retired in 2019, months before the pandemic. I wish it had been that clearcut: good then bad, Before then After. I wish that before the pandemic, my duties as a high school teacher had never required actions I found awkward or dangerous. 

Students threw chairs at the wall (twice) and a padlock at me (once), they yelled at me and at classmates, fell asleep in their chair from lack of sleep and drug overdose. Kids worked long and often illegal hours to support family or pay their own dental bills, and parents called them from school to put in a shift during school hours, which violates state laws. Poverty was the overarching threat to their education, but there was no escape for kids from more affluent homes: One boy put hashmarks on my whiteboard for six weeks. I did not ask him why until he came in one morning and gravely erased them all: six weeks sober. A homeless girl who was welcome elsewhere was sleeping on dirt in a backyard shed in order to protect her mentally ill mother she refused to leave alone. It was a bad choice, but a compassionate and loving one.

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