Ink Tea Stone Leaf

I work as a tutor in the AVID program at a local high school. As part-time staff, I typically leave for home fairly early, between 1:15 and 1:30. Most days I have a few significant opportunities to help students understand a difficult problem, and a little downtime to read or to work out some puzzles. I get along well with the AVID teachers and most of the kids appreciate my presence. It’s not a bad schedule for me, all things considered.

Today I was set to spend the last forty five minutes of my shift in one of the teacher’s classroom, helping 11th graders with editing their assignments. I didn’t do very much of that, though, because the red light started flashing and the alarm started blaring. I didn’t know if it was a drill, because nobody tells me these things ahead of time; either way, part of my job is to take drills as seriously as the real thing. We all stopped what we were doing and followed procedure, as we’ve all done before. We followed it for a little over forty minutes.

On the instructions of the police, at 12:35 the office ordered what they call a Lockdown Condition 3, which meant we were to shut off the lights, blind the windows, lock and barricade all entrances to the classroom, and gather in silence in one corner of the room. About two minutes later, after we finished converting the nearest desks and chairs into our last line of defense, the alert was downgraded to Lockdown Condition 2, which is just like Condition 3, except that you don’t have to build any barricades. We left them up, of course.

There is no telling how long you may be in lockdown, because the office does not communicate anything about the situation except what the condition is, and what you need to do about it. You are expected to be silent, and it struck me how very nearly silent the kids were. Experience has shown me that getting kids to stop talking for any length of time is usually a hopeless endeavor. It was over a half hour before I heard any whispered conversations that went beyond a few quick words. There were the inevitable sounds of shifting and leaning and shuffling of feet, coughs and whatnot, but what can you do about that? They took it seriously, and I was grateful for that. Back when I had my own classroom and was responsible for guiding students through lockdown drills, I once had a chowder-head who spent the whole drill mouthing off about how if there was a real shooter on the campus, he’d just go kick his ass.

It was so quiet that when somebody walked by the door with a walkie-talkie, we could hear what they were saying. I don’t remember what they said, because it wasn’t important, but I could hear it all the same. I remember wondering, when whoever it was passed by, what that indicated about the density of the bricks that stood between me and whatever it was I was supposed to be worried about. There was a lot to wonder about, and a lot of time to wonder.

I itched for something to do to pass the time, but my bag was lying over by the door, precisely where nobody was supposed to go and get it. If it had been on my person when the alarm sounded, I would have had just enough light to do something to distract myself. I have a book of puzzles in there, and I recently began reading the complete works of Shakespeare. Either would do, but neither was at hand.

Of course, I had my phone in my pocket. I even looked at it once, to see if the school had sent out a text message with any information (there was a text, though it told me very little that wasn’t already apparent), but keeping it out and staring at the screen for however long didn’t feel like the right move. My best choice, I decided, was to stand stoically, breathe regularly, and contemplate my odds of survival in the event that an act of desperate heroism was suddenly required.

Let’s take a step back from that last sentence. There aren’t many people who get into the ed biz with dreams of valiantly taking a bullet to save the life of a child. Somehow, due to a set of very interesting choices that our society has collectively made, it has become a tacit part of our job description. Much as the residents of Naples prefer most days to ignore the nearby volcano which has famously obliterated multiple communities in its vicinity, teachers choose not to dwell on the fact that a nation which scorns the idealism of the passionate educator expects them to eagerly die for it. But when you’re locked in the dark with twenty five teenagers and a small but certainly more-than-zero chance that somebody in the hallway has the means and motive to murder you all, well, you’ve got to spare some thought.

As the minute hand crept further up the side of my watch, and I heard nothing but a few walkie-talkies, I reasoned that the odds we were in any real danger were negligible. At the same time, the length of the episode seemed to indicate that something really was up. Somebody out there represented a real threat to the health or well-being of somebody on campus, or else the administration wouldn’t convert fifteen, twenty, or thirty minutes of instructional time into silence. It wouldn’t have been at all surprising to learn afterward that somebody had been hurt; hopefully not one of ours, but somebody nonetheless.

Every once in a while I looked around at the kids, most of whom had no compunction about cell phone usage. It probably helped soothe some nerves; they were certainly making all of the same inferences I was, ruminating on that same small but certainly real possibility that something horrible might be happening. Whatever the real risk they faced, a piece of time had been stolen from them. It was time they could have spent feeling certain that in that place, nobody was actively trying to hurt them. Instead, it was time spent with nothing to do but think “we’ll probably be OK, but I guess there’s a chance that we might not be.” I suppose there are worse things.

There were other things to think about, I guess. My mind wandered to possibilities for my novel’s concluding chapters, the intricacies of patterns in the paintings and posters on the wall, the diminishing arch support in the soles of my boots, and my growing bodily awareness that the only nourishment I’d had all day was a latte, a glazed donut, and a tootsie roll pop. On top of everything else to worry about, I had to add the necessity of acquiring a vegetable, posthaste.

After about forty minutes, the PA announced Lockdown Condition 1, which meant the doors would stay locked, but the lights could come back on and normal activity could resume. There was a huge release of tension, as kids laughed and lightly complained about needing to use the bathroom. Moments later, at 1:16, we received the “all clear” message, and as it happened to be the end of the class period, we all went our separate ways. Everybody I saw in the hall was smiling, much more broadly and openly than normal for high school students. On my way out I was greeted by a boy I know from another AVID class, and we shared a fist bump. That doesn’t usually happen.

So why did we lock down? It seems the cops chased somebody driving an allegedly stolen car into our parking lot. Thrilling stuff. We didn’t know any of that at the time. I didn’t learn about the stolen car until after I drove home, stopping along the way at the grocery store to purchase and consume an entire cucumber. We all cope with existential dread in different ways.

I was one of only two people in that room who were old enough to remember Columbine. When I was in middle school, the idea of an armed attack on schoolchildren was so shocking that it felt at least partly unreal. Columbine was a “story” more than a “fact” to a kid growing up far from the scene. Walking out of the school today, I questioned whether the reality of school violence as a widespread phenomenon in American culture will ever truly feel “real” to somebody who hasn’t experienced it firsthand. I’ve worked in education, in one capacity or another, for over ten years, and while I’ve never witnessed a shooting, I have lost track of the number of times in which I found myself working under some level of genuine threat. Even now, the thought that I could be killed one day at a job where I help kids learn seems not only unlikely (and statistically, it is in fact very unlikely), but absurd, as if the universe itself were structurally aligned against it. Surely every lockdown is like this one, a modest overreaction borne from an abundance of caution?

And yet, just this week the school installed metal detectors for students at all the entrances. I used to be able to walk right in the front door with my badge out; now I have to go through the office to avoid the security line. The kids don’t look happy about it, and when I think of all the very interesting choices that our society has made, which have led to the conviction that the only way to protect children from people who want to kill them with ridiculously lethal weapons is to “harden the target” and transform schools until they are nearly indistinguishable from prisons, well, I’m probably only a little less unhappy than them.

I don’t know if I can say much more about it without wanting to scream, so I’ll leave it at that. As far as I know, everybody is fine, and once again I’ll be reporting for duty tomorrow morning. TGIF and all that. Welcome, once again, to the first day of the future.