Another first today: lock down and shooting
A female ninth grader was shot half a block away from school just as school let out today. The student was not critically injured. Police descended on the campus and we were locked down for about 90 minutes while they searched for the suspects.
In other news, students are still being shuffled around between classes, though my enrollments have been relatively stable. One colleague just had one of her classes changed into a new section of geometry. This is already the sixth week of school. Many colleagues are frustrated and teacher morale is low.
Update: A student in one of my classes claims to be a friend of the girl who was shot, and told me that the bullet was not intended for this girl but for someone else. School seemed to run as normal the next day, students didn’t seem affected. Perhaps it shows that these students just see these kinds of things as part of their daily lives?
Adventures in Teaching 
What a terrifying, awful day. I want to say that I am glad you are OK, but I am guessing that you are not OK. The difficulties with learning and focus you have described up to now have seemed possible to overcome. It is much harder for me to imagine how to handle situations in which nobody feels safe.
It sounds like you reacted to the stress of the situations amazingly well. It is good to hear that some students were trying to help you diffuse the situation, and I am glad you had the support of the other teacher. Writing this, I wonder if the students feel as much stress or whether it is something that in some sense they are used to? In any case, I suspect it takes its toll.
I’ll be thinking of you and your students especially much tomorrow. I hope you can share a few easier days to help you all recover from such a stressful one.
What a week. You are making a difference for these students, even if it seems like trying to teach in your environment is impossible. I agree with the previous commenter that you (and your students) deserve a break from this awful week. Your students appreciate you, even if they’d never admit it.
And thank you for sharing the good, bad, and ugly in this blog.
Howdy.
That really really sucks. I always feel like safety at school is a prerequisite to meaningful learning…learning can distract you from whether or not you are safe but it still looms. Safety is always a concern at school and it is a priority. I hope this is not a school-related shooting.
That said, a few years back one of my freshman girls told me she needed to leave class during 1st period. I asked “where to,” she paused and then said “TO my locker [pause] to get, uh my, notebook.” I wrote her a pass and realized as she walked out that her notebook and belongings were on her desk. I asked her where she went when she came back and she said her locker and had brought a notebook back so I thought nothing of it. Later, at lunch duty, I overheard students talking about a gun. My 1st period girl usually sat at this table. The next day, my 1st period girl was not in class and her upper-classman friend was not at the lunch table. Apparently he was in a gang alteration and had brought a gun to school the prior day to solve it. She heard about it and visited him during my class, convinced him to give her the gun and stashed the gun in her locker. Both were expelled. She was a hard-worker and one of the students I had connected with and got her to “like” math.