Are you asking teachers to be cops?

i have this plan. now, it’s a scientific situation, i think. we have teachers telling people “i don’t want to be armed, that’s a major hazard in a classroom, i want no guns” and people telling teachers “you’d be able to shoot before you got shot.” so i figure - here’s the situation. a little summer camp, or reality show. I genuinely believe people who say that stuff just have no idea how to teach, what it’s like in an emergency, or the way that kids respond to surprises.

Movies show a lot of cool-in-the-moment heroism that people emulate because they can shoot a can at 20 feet. that’s understandable. the universe makes more sense if we have control over it.
But we get these people, who haven’t taught, who don’t understand, and we make them teach for a month. at the end of it, if they “win”, they get a big ol’ lump sum. but if these kids don’t pass a standardized test, you will be punished with less money. You are in charge of the safety and well-being of these children, which means playing chef, counselor, case worker, and teacher. failure to notice any small situation will also take away money from your winnings.
and i give you a paintgun and i say - at some point, you will have someone break in and “kill” your students.

If you do what you said and neutralize the threat, you get money and prove you were right. shoot the wrong person, no money. get shot, no money. plain and simple. you can get fired, the money isn’t guaranteed. you’re expected to act like a real teacher.

And then we let our student actors take over. We let all those small every day emergencies take place: the cliques and the fights and the refusal to listen and realizing your voice can’t be raised any louder and oh, great, he stapled himself to his paper and is that child showing signs of abuse and neglect or is he just going through a phase of not taking showers and having to use your own money to pay for basic things kids need and the after-school meetings and the chaperoning and the staff meeting that ran late again and the papers you haven’t graded yet and you forgot to make lunch and they take it out of your paycheck if you eat there and that one kid who like, always asks to go the bathroom? all the time? but you’re not legally allowed to tell him no and he knows that? and that one student who is flagging behind that you know needs help but remains super distant from you and that other student who you know needs a challenge but is shy about being pressured and that student who writes an essay which is super dark and even though you’ve written tons of dark shit you gotta have “the talk” with them and when six kids get food poisoning at the same time and when half of them seem to erupt in tiny emergencies simultaneously even though you have one body on top of also having to teach and getting help for that student who confesses she gets hit or is pregnant or steals things and you’re now in charge of this, for a month, knowing: at any point, someone is going to start shooting. either outside or in the classroom. at any time.

and i wonder - could you really do it? like, in your dream, in your fantasy, you have this magical situation where everyone is calm, where you know who is coming through the door, where you aren’t distracted by a student throwing up or presenting or asking an inappropriate question. in your hero complex, you aren’t stretched thin, you’re not living off of scraps, and you raise your eyes to somebody and you kill them. it works. i’ll admit that it works in your head, where everything is perfect, your aim is steady, and you never make a mistake.

but in the real life, when you’re living with the stress of any moment it could happen: would you accidentally shoot someone who’s just showing up to class late and dresses in black? when the gloomy scary-paper-writing kid reaches into his backpack, do you shoot him for pulling out his stuffed animal? do you shoot the police officer who is coming to check in on you? do you shoot the principal who likes to do “surprise visits”? do you shoot the kid who likes to prank and was just waiting to surprise you behind the desk? when children are running around and you don’t know who is doing the killing, who do you kill? who do you shoot in the .003 seconds it takes for a bullet to reach you? when kids are sobbing and begging you to throw a chair through the window so they can jump the 3 floors to safety, when they’re laughing as a fear response, when they really need to go to the bathroom in a lockdown, when it’s actually a fire drill not a lockdown but you’re not sure the shooter isn’t outside, when the shouting is actually a class 2 doors down just having a good time, when someone screams bloody murder because a spider!,

when kids are fascinated by weapons and are totally okay with taking it from you, when that door opens and it’s that kid you love (you should, you know, love all of them, that’s part of the job too) and your brain is telling you shoot but your heart is too busy thinking why would you - when you’re in the break room and it happens and there’s just running and bullets when you’re not positioned perfectly facing the door because a kid dropped his earring, when you have to watch kids die - could you do it? could you save the day?

you’re in charge of getting all 22 of your students quiet into a corner or closet, you’re in charge of making sure they don’t take their things and they don’t try and call 911 too many times and they don’t try and call their parents to say “i’m sorry, i love you, i love you,” because that confession will tell the shooter we’re alive in the classroom, and oh my god you just remembered that one kid who always goes to the bathroom is trapped outside, do you open the door and let him in – try and aim a gun while doing that. just try it.

lol

and you can, maybe, if you’re navy-seal-trained or police-trained (if we had wanted those professions we would have chosen them, just like we don’t ask cops to be teachers). and maybe, if you’re the right kind of person, if you manage the emergency perfectly: but are you sure you also took perfect care of your students? because the truth is, you can’t constantly be perfectly on your guard. your attention will have to, at some point, be split. in this scenario, you’d know the attack is, at some point, coming. that there is no real danger, that the kids are actors and the guns are paintguns and that this is all for a paycheck, at the end of the day, a little summer fun activity. but you have to do all of this.

and if you think, okay, it doesn’t sound hard. i can do that and pick up a month of easy work, okay! sounds great. we’ll take volunteers in the fall.

but good teachers know. we know there isn’t going to be a perfect, peaceful calm. that students won’t duck out of the way, that you’re probably going to be the furthest person from the door, that you can’t just shoot every person who enters the room. that the stress of it makes you break, because we aren’t trained to survive a war zone. we know.
but hey, for you, it would just be a little reality tv show.