As a high school teacher I am struck by how often I have to decide whether to add “Discuss the shooting” to the class agenda.
Of course we talked about the local tragedy of Oct. 25. When we were back in class after the shelter-in-place days, a student asked how it could be that two other mass shootings had taken place in America since the one that rocked our town.
Another student asked, “Will this shooter inspire other people to do the same thing?” More than one student who grew up outside the U.S. said they could not imagine such a thing happening in their home countries. One student wrote a poem about the 627 mass shootings that have taken place in the U.S. this year.
We don’t discuss every one of these incidents — we would never talk about anything else. But students have thoughts about these things, and questions.
Students have questions, for example, about the U.S. role in Gaza, where American weapons continue to be used to kill Palestinian civilians after Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7.
Students ask why America continues to block a ceasefire, and why the United Nations seems essentially powerless to stem the violence.
I often don’t have answers to their questions. But I want to honor their attempts to make sense of their world, when TV news, social media, and political discourse offer an endless feed of violence and violent rhetoric. The classroom can be a place to stop scrolling and question what we consider “business as usual.”
Writer Suzy Hansen wrote recently of a need to stop time long enough to account for the killing we hear about — and, increasingly, see — every day, and to reconsider our government’s role in the killing. “Without such an effort,” she writes, “Americans, especially young Americans, who have only known this violent century, will continue to struggle without even a baseline faith in this country’s ideals.”
I want the public school classroom to be a place where students shape their country’s ideals, and build the faith in each other they’ll need to live up to them. They start this process by asking questions about how we got here.
Mimi Marstaller, Lewiston
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