Reflecting on Violence and Those in the Line of Fire. Uncovering Numbers And Thinking About Teaching Writing

After I listened to President Obama's post-Oregon speech in regard to gun violence in the nation, I thought about an intellectual friend and mentor, the author and activist Jan Arnow. She sent me a copy of her newest book, In the Line of Fire: Raising Kids in a Violent World - a reflection of four decades of anti-violent work.  When I first began teaching, Jan's children were in my classroom (Chloe and Abe). Fortunate for me I was also a colleague with her through the No More Violence project she built with Brown School students.

We live in a violent world. There's no denying that. I'm not sure if it is our canines or how we are nurtured through the onslaught of media. More than likely the answer rests in the middle. We are a vicious species.  As Arnow points out in her book, we are quickly pacified with violence because it is ubiquitous (and political) in every aspect of our lives. In her words,

Once the blow of the next school masacre, teen suicide, or drug deal gone badly has passed, and we drift back to believing in the illusion of safety and security in our lives, we become callused and indifferent to these topics. It is precisely during times of feeling shocked, vulnerable, and upset that these difficult topics should be discussed and debated.  (xii)

Soon after Obama's speech, I signed up for the Vicky Soto 5K run in Stratford - a fundraising event for scholarships offered in the name of the teacher heroine. Around the same time, I received a Google alert highlighting that journalists, Chiaramonte and Skinner, were reporting on Alice Linahan's aggravation with a NWP/KQED collaboration that asked American students to sift through  facts about guns in the United States. After students work through charts and bulleted information, they are invited to add perspective on gun issues in a variety of suggested ways. Linahan founded a parent's group called Voices Empower and uses democratic rights to raise concerns about education - especially with the federal government's investment in Common Core State Standards (of which I would agree). Voices Empower feels that the federal government overstepped boundaries with the NWP/KQED supplemental curriculum. Her claim is the material is "one-sided." Personally, I view the material as a  listing of facts designed to develop writers and thinkers in schools.

Nerds do what nerds do, and they read. They think. The pontificate. And they process on blogs like this (well, I do, anyway).

I looked at the "controversial" "curriculum" yesterday and noted that it is not curriculum. Instead, it is a way to assist critical thinking and analytical skills should a teacher professionally choose to use it. It is a supplement - an option. The two authors, Spall and Sloan, provide a single resource for other educators to use should they find it relevant to their classroom goals (interestingly, the authors are not public school teachers and, therefore, not required to follow a Common Core State Standards framework. They are teachers at a Catholic and charter school who, in their hard work, wrote the supplemental materials for fellow educators to think through research and analysis about guns in the United States). Censoring a "supplement" like this, I believe, is counterintuitive to the democratic concerns Linahan's raises. The material provided by Spall and Sloan offers a neutral list of numbers and resources that are designed to get young people to take notice of the world they live in...that is, the facts. The political nature of the content, I suppose, is why the story was picked up by Fox news and stands at the heart of Linehan's critique. That, however, is speculation. It is a debate about the 2nd amendment.

I've been crunching numbers about school shootings that have occurred in my twenty years as a classroom teacher and researcher. I've been trying to take a position that conversations about violence should matter to K-12 classrooms. Personally, I don't know how it can be avoided: we teach biology and survival of the fittest. We teach history and world civilizations. We process current events that, on a daily basis, cover the difficult realities of the 21st century.

Violence is everywhere. It lurks in the shadows of wherever human beings reside.

Obama (2015) said in his statement about Umpqua Community College,

But as I said just a few months ago, and I said a few months before that, and I said each time we see one of these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough. It's not enough. It does not caputre the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel. And it does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted someplace else in America -- next week, or a couple of months from now. (p. 2)

In the twenty years I've worked in public schools, there have been 12 lives, on average, lost per year to insipid shootings in American classrooms. That is 12 lives too many. It should be noted, though, that lightening strikes kill more Americans per year than school shootings (not that it lessens the ridiculousness of carnage in our schools but, like shark attacks, the probability of such occasions are rare). Still, the death of any individual in our schools is tragedy. Obama also remarked,

That means there are more American families -- moms, dads, children -- whose lives have been changed forever. That means there's another community stunned with grief, and communities across the country forced to relive their own anguish, and parents across the country who are scared because they know it might have been their families and their children. (pp. 1-2)

Those of us living in the shadow of Newtown and Sandy Hook can attest to this. Although school shootings are small in number compared to gang-related deaths, automobile-deaths, flu-deaths, and definitely cancer-deaths, we cannot deny the fact that 32,000 deaths occur each year in the U.S. because of gun violence. I know it is not the guns. It is the shooters. That is at the center of it all.

265 military lives were lost on average in global conflicts in the last 20 years -- lives taken while protecting American interests. Those numbers, however,  are minuscule compared to the 32,000, internal deaths occurring per year in the U.S. due this country.

How can this not be a central conversation for schools in the United States?

When I taught 9-12th graders in Kentucky, I asked myself a simple question, "How many lives have been lost in wars so I would have an opportunity and freedom to promote democratic thinking in my classroom?" I did the research and learned the number is 103,755,200 lives, of which 1,293,158 were American. That many individuals died so that Linehan and I can both articulate our views in a free country. That is  democracy. A lot of violence had to occur so that I would have a chance to even think about violence in relation to literacy today. The literature I taught (as expected from district, state, and national recommendations) from Euripides to Shakespeare, YA novels to memoirs, refugee stories to Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, did not allow my colleagues and I to censor the conversation about violence in our classrooms. Dialogue about violence is par for the course when teaching literature: war, greed, hubris, rape, bullying, racism, psychology and, yes, guns.

Arnow's In the Line of Fire is a valuable resource for educators like me who work in K-12 schools. Her nine chapters unravel multiple truths about violence in our modern world. She asks readers to  keep a dialogue moving forward (in the same way the NWP/KQED writing supplement does). As I read her book, I reflected on Sandy Hook. I thought about hundreds of essays I read from my own students about the violence they witnessed and experienced in their lives. I contemplated the research I did with African-born male refugee youth relocated to the United States after surviving civil conflicts in their own countries. Finally, I thought about the 17-year old junior who was killed  a month ago as a result of violence - a kid attending a local high school where I spend much of my time working with teachers and youth.

I do agree with Alice Linahen and her critique of Common Core State Standards (I'm not one for federal control of our schools nor do I appreciate the politics behind their creation and reform agenda). I disagree with Linahen, however, about the argument that the NWP/KQED writing supplement is biased. If I was at lunch with her I'd probably ask her, "What do you think schools are supposed to do? How would she recommend we help students think about the world they live in? What responsibility do we adults have to raising young people to be aware of the world (and violence) they're inheriting?"

Coghlan (2000) wrote,

We, as English teachers, need to teach our students how to live in it [a violent world], and, more importantly, how to work to improve it. The English classroom provides a fitting place to integrate anti-violence teaching into the academic curriculum. It readily offers opportunities to teach conflict resolution strategies, instill respect for cultural diversity, provide an atmosphere for cooperative learning while acknowledgeing controversy, and heighten personalization, empathy, and respect - all factors that, violence prevention programs indicate, contribute to the reduction of violence. (85)

Personally, I'm not anti-violence, as much as I'm anti-censorship of what should be and shouldn't be taught in school. I agree with Maryum Ali, Muhammad Ali's daughter, and what she wrote in the forward of Arnow's text,

In order for us to save our kids, we must have a comprehensive undertanding of where violent thinking and behaviors orgininate. Being proactive at all states of [youth] development is the key that can unlock the door to a safer existence, but everyone must do his or her part and be held accountable for the world's children and their futures. (v)

I believe in youth development and I believe in the power of writing to help students to be empowered as active citizens. It is not my duty to teach students what to think, but HOW to think. That, I believe, is the strength of Arnow's book and the supplemental curriculum created by NWP/KQED.

And with that, I need to go for a run. In a week I will show my support for a teacher-heroine who lost her life, along with 25 others, as a result of senseless violence. While I run I will continue to think about Arnow's book, the reality of violence in this nation and the world, and my responsibility to the teachers and students who work in American schools.

Ali, M. (2015). Foreward. In J. Arnow (Ed.), In the Line of Fire; Raising Kids in a Viuolent World. Louisville, Kentucky: Butler Books.

Arnow, J. (2015). In the Line of Fire: Raising Kids in a Violent World. Louisville, Kentucky: Butler Books.

Coghlan, R. (2000). The Teaching of Anti-Violence Strategies with the English Curriculum. The English Journal, 89(5), 84-89.

Obama, B. (2015). Statement by the President on the Shootings at Umpqua Community College, Roseburg, Oregon [Press release]. Retrieved from https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/10/01/statement-president-shootings-umpqua-community-college-roseburg-oregon