Opaque Lucidity

The Old Schoolyard

The Lovely Kelli officially begins her career as an English teacher today. She has been an employee of the Jefferson County Public Schools for several weeks now, but today is the first day of school for the kids in the Louisville metro area, so this is her first day with a room full of empty minds waiting to be filled with her wisdom. That's my image, anyway. She chose this career path over two years ago, when we were already in our mid-30s. It is the rare person who can walk away from one career into another at this point in life; other than Kelli, my best friend Peter is the only person I spend time with who has done so. It takes an enormous amount of faith in oneself to make it happen.

Kelli told me about some of the plans her school has in place in the event someone comes in and takes hostages or starts shooting. For the sake of security, I will not delve into the details here; suffice it to say that it served as a real wake up call for me as to the realities of school life in the 21st century. As Kelli spoke, I was thinking about the training I had received in the Navy. When a ship prepares for battle (called going to general quarters), some or all the watertight hatchways on board are closed. While seemingly callous, the reason for this is simple: if one compartment floods, it will not flood the entire ship. The crew in the flooded compartment will die. That's the way it works. The men and women who serve on warships accept this grim possibility because that's part of the job. It may not enter their minds every day, but when something goes awry (like a seal on a torpedo tube door leaking), it is expected that the hatchways in and out of their compartment are going to be sealed until the trouble is fixed or everyone in there is dead from drowning.

I am saddened by the fact that public and private schools across this country are forced to deal with deadly possibilities because those possibilities have come to fruition in places like Columbine and dozens of other towns across this and other countries. No 14- or 17-year old signs up for this; they are in school to receive an education. It says something terrible about our society that all children now live with the unspoken reality that this can happen anywhere.