Another Teacher Killed in Danvers, Massachusetts

THE PICTURE AT THE END OF THE POST IS RELATED TO A SEPARATE INCIDENT, A SCHOOL SHOOTING IN CHARDON, OHIO


Monday, I picked up the New York Times and read again about how dumb America’s teachers supposedly are.

I’m a retired teacher myself, and a liberal, too, and love to read the Times. So, maybe that does make me dumb.

More on that in a moment; but a few hours later I turned on the TV and heard about the school shooting in Sparks, Nevada.

Depending on how you count such incidents the shooting at Sparks Middle School was the fifteenth in or near a school this year. (That includes a number of episodes involving gunfire on college campuses.) In Sparks, the shooter, 12, wounded two classmates, killed Michael Lansberry, a teacher and ex-Marine who served in Afghanistan, then took his own life.

Today we have terrible news again.

The body of Colleen Ritzer, 24-year-old math teacher at Danvers High School in Danvers, Massachusetts, has been discovered behind her school. Blood was found in a second-floor school bathroom and a 14-year-old has been charged with murder.

It’s bad enough, then, that American students and teachers are killed with such sanguine regularity. The Sandy Hook Elementary massacre briefly focused attention on the problem. But the deaths of one or two or three individuals, here and there, are no less horrifying. Here in Ohio, last April, a La Salle High School student shot himself in the head and ended up in critical condition. In February 2012, gunfire erupted at Chardon High, not far from Cleveland. That incident left three teens dead, a fourth paralyzed, and one “slightly” wounded.

(Imagine that you are the parent and find that your son or daughter was “slightly” wounded at school that day.)

Worse yet—if there can be a “worse” when it comes to such matters—the Chardon shooter showed no remorse in court. At his sentencing, T. J. Lane, 18, wore a plain white tee shirt on which the word “KILLER” was scrawled in magic marker. “This hand that pulled the trigger that killed your sons,” he told stunned families in court, “now masturbates to the memory. F--- all of you.”

With that he flipped everyone the bird.

So here I sit in my safe retirement. I read these stories of mayhem in the schools and find myself sickened. I read of the father who stuck his infant daughter in a freezer to stop her from crying. I read—in the Times, of all places—that 10% of babies born in Scioto County (again, here in Ohio) are addicted to drugs. I read in the Times, again, that 15% of parents let their sons and daughters stay home from school twenty times or more every year.

Then I read the editorial on Monday: “An Industry of Mediocrity.” I know my disgust is as nothing in the face of very real tragedy in Sparks or Danvers. A stupid article is nothing compared to the loss of a loved one. Still, this article is all too typical in its lame attempt to come to grips with “what’s wrong with America’s schools.”

I think to myself: “Maybe part of the trouble involves ‘gunfire.’”

Well, what industry is producing all this “mediocrity?” Colleges of education, naturally! What is the mediocre product? Why, it’s you and me, a nation’s public school teachers.

Here’s the gist of the article:

• America’s teachers aren’t all that bright. According to “one respected study” only 23% come from the top third of college graduates. That sounds bad, till you stop to realize, statistically speaking, that only 33% should come from the top third—the same as bankers, bakers, butchers and editorial writers.

• Worse yet, only 14% of teachers in high-poverty schools come from the top third of their college classes. 

• People who run charter schools are quoted, insisting that, yes, it’s true! Charter schools are way better than regular public schools. That’s because they have freedom to pick teachers and don’t pick dimwits. (I admit I’m paraphrasing.)

• The article quotes individuals who run various foundations interested in reforming education (but much too smart to go into the high-poverty schools and do any teaching). These theorists promise that, sure, they know exactly how to fix education.

• Some college professor who did a study grumbles about how we train teachers. There are a few good training programs. Sadly, most don’t require middle school math teachers to study calculus before entering the classroom. Therefore, “Some of our education programs are putting out math teachers at the level of Botswana.” (Damn! Botswana!) Worse, yet, according to Bill Keller, who penned the column, “the Botswana-level teacher programs produce about 60% of America’s future middle school math teachers.”

• Finland has better teachers—all chosen from the top third of their classes. We need to copy this system. Keller quotes Amanda Ripley (who also did not choose to go into a high-povertry school), who wrote an entire book about Finland’s smarter teachers. (I admit I liked a large part of what Ripley had to say in The Smartest Kids in the World, but I’m not buying this happy myth about how we could solve all our problems if only we had smarter teachers.)

Finally, Keller notes that there are already 3.3 million public school teachers in America today. They can’t all be trained (retrained?) by new methods or start-up programs. So, hell, we’re temporarily screwed, at best, and there’s still a lot of “widespread mediocrity.”

What I notice, very sadly, is that there’s a lot of gunfire. And I don’t think you have to graduate in the top third of any class, not even kindergarten, to realize most of the problems “in” our schools have deep roots in a society outside their walls.

I don’t think the main problems in education have anything to do with where Michael Landsberry or Colleen Ritzer or any of the rest of us finished in the college rankings.

I’m surprised editorial writers continue to miss the point. 

Say a prayer for all the students and teachers.

T. J. Lane gunned down several classmates.

Guns and Innocent Blood: What Are We Going to Do?

EVER AMERICAN OUGHT TO BE SICK TONIGHT. Gun-owners and non-gun owners, alike, it doesn’t matter. Every one of us should be ill.  

How else does one react to news of the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown? We now know that twenty children, mostly first graders, were cut down in a fusillade of gunfire. An elementary school here in America was reduced to a charnel house. Eight adults are dead, too, six of them men and women who rose this morning for work, never expecting to die, and dedicated only to helping children learn to sing and spell and subtract and smile at the dawn of knowledge.  

Maybe, I’m too emotional.  

I’m a retired teacher and a parent and I think about all the terrified children inside that slaughter pen and parents outside, not knowing the scope of the tragedy, praying sons and daughters were safe, learning, horribly, that they weren’t. I think back to my own experience in 1985, when a young man brought a gun to my school to shoot me.  

At times like this, most of us shake our heads and have no idea what to say. There’s no pattern to this kind of violence. It can happen anytime, anywhere, we think. 

The problem is that there’s a pattern. It keeps happening all the time and it keeps happening here, in this country. In Ohio, where I live, a bloody shooting occurred at Chardon High this past February. Before the carnage finally ended three teenagers were dead and two others badly wounded.  

You can find Demetrius Hewlin’s obituary on line if you care. Known as “D” to friends, he was one of the slain. Born March 8, 1995. Died February 28, 2012. A sixteen-year-old gunned down in the cafeteria by another teen with a gun. 

That’s the thread that runs through all these stories, the guns. Don’t you see? Don’t you care? When do we admit that we are already the “best-armed” nation in modern history? When do we agree that guns are absurdly easy to acquire? Already, there are 88 handguns, rifles and shotguns in private hands for every 100 Americans. Boil down the pro- and anti-gun arguments to their essence. You don’t read about people in this country killing each other with hand grenades. That’s because it’s not easy to get your hands on hand grenades. 

Guns are easy, though. 

As a result, we lead all modern nations in murder rates and lead by a gory mile. The murder rate in Iceland is close to zero. In Japan it’s .5 per 100,000 people. If you study a list of 32 advanced nations The Netherlands comes in tenth, with 1 murder per 100,000. Finland is 31st with 2.5. The United States stands last with 5.2 per 100,000.

Guns in America are a problem and that fact is written again in the blood of innocent children. Think of the guns, the guns, the guns. Twelve dead, fifty-eight injured in a theater in Aurora, Colorado. The massacre in Arizona that ended with 9-year-old Christina Green-Taylor and five others dead, twelve wounded, including Gabby Gifford. Thirty-two dead and seventeen wounded at Virginia Tech in 2007. 

The list is long and horrific and it comes down to guns.  

Better than most, I understand what it’s like to have a loaded weapon carried into a classroom. Twenty-seven years ago a young man brought a pistol to school to shoot me and to shoot one of his teammates on the wrestling squad. The other boy had been taunting him about weight and I had caught the boy during class drawing an obscene picture and told him to take it home and show his dad. That was all it took—a teen with emotional issues—easy access to guns—a potential disaster in the making. The boy carried a loaded weapon around all day in our school, hidden in a book bag, but for reasons unknown never pulled it out to start shooting. He didn’t shoot me. He didn’t shoot his classmates by mistake. He didn’t shoot his wrestling teammate. Ten years later, however, he picked up another gun—still just as easily accessible—and shot himself.  

IN THE END, THIS ISN’T about gun owners vs. non-gun owners, or hunters vs. vegans, or conservatives vs. liberals. This is about the massacre of elementary school kids. It’s about blood on the floor—in classrooms —theaters—and malls. 

It’s about guns.  

You can either address the issue in a reasonable fashion or you can keep burying the innocent—this time mostly six and seven-year-olds. Or you can make some absurdist argument that we’re all better off the more guns we have, that first grade teachers (and everyone else in America) should be armed and ready.  

In the face of this tragedy every American should be asking today, “What are we, as a society, going to do?” 

Say a prayer for the dead.

Allison Wyatt, murdered at age 6.
Sandy Hook Elementary.