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Approaching School Violence

© Melissa Sztuczko-Payk

My school district's guest teaching manual advises substitute teachers to avoid discussing difficult/controversial topics with students. That's generally pretty easy to do, but sometimes it's nearly impossible.

The day after the school shooting incident which involved two first graders, I taught in a first grade classroom. Now, I regularly rely on current events as good springboards to time-filling activities. This particular day, though, I was rather hurried and didn't even give a thought to what had happened the day before. So there we were, gathered on the carpet for sharing time, when a student asked me, "Did you hear about the girl who was shot yesterday?" Of course, they didn't say "little girl" like we adults might, because to my students she was a peer, a "big girl" like them.

Of course, the day after the shooting at Columbine High School, I was more than prepared to discuss the situation in the high school class to which I was assigned. Teens have life experienc (although not as much as they might think) that helps them to relate, at least a little, to such situations. But first graders are a world apart. They still believe life should be fair and everybody should be nice, so they really, really don't get it.

So, here we were gathered on the carpet and the conversation neary explodes with why's. Why did he want to hurt her? Why did grownups let him take a gun to school? Why didn't the teachr stop him? And I could not answer a single question with any degree of certainty. But this is what I did tell them..

1. Some things we hear on the news and read in the newspaper are true; other things are not. Sometimes people say things that are wrong,but they think they're telling the truth. They just get confused. We talked about situations where they'd been wrongly blamed or someone said something about them that wasn't true, and I explained some of what we hear on the news is wrong.

2. Sometimes we grownups can't let ourselves believe the kids we love would hurt someone else. And we all like to believe that when we teach the kids we love to stay away from guns and other things that can hurt them, kids will be smart enough to follow the rules. So sometimes even loving grownups make horrible mistakes and something like this happens.

3. It's very hard to say what the teacher or other students "should" have done when they saw the gun. First, we don't know how much time they had to try to take the gun away. Second, sometimes people are so afraid that they can't move or say anything.

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