You can almost hear it -- the click of a cocked gun hammer, the sound of a slug propelled from its chamber, and the screaming. trump's gun-toting-teacher scenario fires up the head trip.
Shoot and ask questions later
The president said that the Parkland massacre wouldn't have happened if teachers carried firearms: “They would have shot the hell out of him before he knew what happened.” The cowboy has spoken. Randi Weingarten, the American Federation of Teachers president, fired back: "Anyone who pushes arming teachers doesn’t understand our schools.” I'm with her.
As a former teacher, I can think of a good reason why adding security to the workload is a bad idea. There's already too much to do.
No time to go to the bathroom
I used to teach in an NYC high school in what was once known as Hell's Kitchen and there was simply no time in the allotted hours for one more task. Allow me to recount a day in the life I once led. It began with homeroom. As a homeroom teacher I was there to ready some three dozen teens for their day, aiding them if they had problems (there were always problems). Teens come weighed with them: low-self-esteem, bullying, strife at home, peer-pressure. The list is long. All I had to offer were band-aids so that when the bells tolled for the first class, the kids in my charge could move forward.
Long day's journey before night
My day was taken up with teaching (art) to five classes plus an additional class in another subject when faculty absence was last-minute, and there was no time to hire a substitute. Are you counting up my assignments yet? Mind you there are 8 periods in a school day. Still, there's one more daily chore, this one when I wasn't in the classroom – a buildinging assignment -- either lunchroom duty, hallway duty or study hall.
You have to love kids to do it all. When I left New York, I worked as a reporter for a daily newspaper, which was also challenging for its deadlines and demanding editors. But journalism is a walk in the park next to teaching.
Are you listening to me?
All that said, I offer the biggest reason why Trump's idea is a bad one. To focus on the kids in a teacher's charge, to see them with a benevolent eye, you can't take on a security guard mindset – the necessarily suspicious eye.
Trump wouldn't understand. When he held a televised “listening session” with the survivors of the Parkland massacre, he carried notecards with talking points, one of which was clearly visible: “I hear you.” Imagine heeding a prompter like that for a “listening session.”
