Memoir, Cont.

The Fall

Our building became the site of a major crime scene investigation.  We had no access to it or anything inside it, like the purses we’d left behind, our materials, our grade books, any of that, for the rest of the year.

At first, central administration determined that the ninth grade would be sent to one high school, tenth to another, and so on.  Kind of scary, the idea that the big decision makers know so little about how a high school works that it never occurred to them that we teach many mixed-grade classes.  The principal at Chatfield High School opened her doors.  Chatfield was once an offshoot of Columbine when Columbine was small and overcrowded.  Later they became our rivals.  Now, Chatfield students attended in the morning, and we did a somewhat abbreviated day in the afternoon.

The Chatfield teachers were amazing.  They emptied out all of their desks in the English office and gave them to us, along with access to their books.  The Chatfield kids made banners and put paper columbines on the classroom desks.  They shared their classrooms without complaint and were kind and generous.

We were in a fog.  A lot of it is a blur now, but I can give you the general gist.  I set poetry aside with my sophomores and ordered a class set of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.  Okay, maybe it’s not “great literature,” but it is about a loner who is different.  A loner who befriends another loner, and together, they rise above the teasing and taunting of others to fly, and to teach their detractors to fly.  To me, it was an affirmation that being different did not have to be bad, and that people could choose the high ground—the perfect message upon which to end the year.

I had them write a paper about their perfect selves.  If they could be perfect, without limits, what would they be like?  I was thinking of boundless generosity and love, so I was disappointed at how many wrote about money and prestige.  Maybe I was asking more than their maturity allowed.  Besides, we all had PTSD.  Thinking was no one’s strong suit.

ACE was hell.  For one thing, when Chatfield was told ACE was a vocational class, they gave us the auto shop.  It was well-intentioned, but not an ideal setting, and to this day, the smell of motor oil gives me a very bad feeling.  The entire student body was locked in at Chatfield.  For security purposes, we ran a security gauntlet at the front door at the beginning of the day, and once inside, there we stayed.  Can you imagine 30 at-risk nicotine addicts with PTSD and no way to go outside and get a smoke?  Pure hell.

Add to this that down the hall was a heavy, spring-loaded door that slammed loudly whenever someone accidentally let it swing shut behind them, which people did fairly routinely in the first week or so, until whomever had classes in there learned not to.  After that, it still happened occasionally.  Remember the half of my ACE class that was in the computer lab when the shootings began?  The computer lab was very near the school library and the hall that Eric and Dylan entered after shooting several students outside.  My ACE partner and the students he was with heard everything.  They literally dodged bullets getting out.  One girl was shot in the leg going from the lab to the ACE hall.  At Chatfield, when the door down the hall slammed, my students literally hit the floor, and class was effectively over for the day while they waited for the adrenalin to wear off.  Hell, I tell you.

After a while, something had to give, and students with bad habits were permitted to leave a few times a day under close supervision to get their fix.  Thank God.

Honestly, I struggle to remember forensics and debate.  We had the awards banquet coming up.  We had voted on the next years’ team officers and for team awards already, as I recall.  A local company offered their corporate facilities for the ceremony.  Already, there was a gap in the way Marti and I were dealing with our grief.  She was throwing herself into the team, preparing for the banquet, thinking about the next year, deciding that we would host state in 2000 to get people back in our building and get things back to normal.

I was alternating between sleepless nights and taking sleeping pills despite the fact that it meant I would be unable to wake from the nightmares that came most nights.  If I took pills, I woke up and dragged my way through the morning, glad that I didn’t have to be at school until fairly late.  Some days, I would throw up in the morning, dreading going to school.  It was everything I could do, and the thought of next year was overwhelming.

Students and teachers were all over the map.  Every day, there were people in tears and people who would not talk about it and people who were angry and people who were angry at the people who were angry, and we were in the same classrooms and hallways.  But there were also hugs, and people who wiped tears and smoothed tempers.  For better or worse, we were family.  The bonds between us were tight.  If a teacher saw a student weeping in the hall, whether they knew each other or not, the teacher opened his or her arms and the student took the embrace like a lifeline.

In between, we pretended to teach and the kids pretended to learn.  We acted like it was school, but it wasn’t.  I don’t know what it was.  All most of us knew was that we wanted it to be over.

Until the last day.  Then we realized that we faced a long, long summer without each other.  Sure, maybe school was weird, but we were weird, and the rest of the world…wasn’t.  I went to the national speech meet in Phoenix, and while everyone was as kind as could be, when they took their first look at my nametag, which also proclaimed my school, they would stop talking mid-sentence and their jaws would drop, and they’d say, “Oh, my God,” or “I’m so sorry.”  Over and over.  Every day.  For a week.

After that came of summer of trying to be relatively normal for the sake of my children, then four and eight-years-old.

tags: columbine high school  school shootings  teaching  ptsd  state testing  trauma