"I am used to it", she said.

Pedagogy, Bombs and Teaching Well

”Lovely days don’t come to you, you should walk to them.” Rumi

For a moment I considered a career change. The combination of teaching writing classes from textbooks to uninspired students and the fear of bumping into a gunmen on campus was enough for me. A few years ago I was done and I’d only been teaching for 10 years. Would the next 10 be this drab? Then, I remembered Billy Crystal in City Slickers and thought that perhaps before I had a mid-life crisis and began to herd cattle across big sky country, I’d simply try a new approach to teaching. After all, I was also constantly feeling hypocritical lecturing about technology and our societal divide while teaching with technology and looking out at rows of desks with aisles separating the already disconnected student body. Group work and peer reviews seemed contrived and counter-productive. Every semester I would see the ill-effects of our cultural ADD lingering in my classrooms. I felt I couldn’t compete with what all the flashy technology had done to their minds. I was losing badly, at a game I loved. Teaching was in my DNA. So was writing. My dad was a Shakespeare-spewing mad man. My mom had the ability to entertain a room full of people with hilarious stories about recent mishaps. I couldn’t understand what was making the act of facilitated knowledge so entirely difficult. All I knew was that I needed to change something…anything.

I decided to send a class proposal to my dean about how I wanted to approach teaching English. My ambition was based on 25% from dozens of textbooks, (mainly the structure of an essay, thesis and MLA), 25% of what I learned from my own MFA program at Columbia College and 50% based on my own convictions. Namely, the belief that the conventional approach to teaching freshman rhetoric is 100% in-effective. Within a week my Dean brought me into his office and approved my class. We talked with excitement and for a minute it kind of felt like that moment you decide to take a road trip with your best friend and you think about all the incredible possibilities and opportunities you will have. I named it, “Writing from the Outside in” ©. It was not only based on Dr. Walsh’s 8 Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes (TLC’s), but endorsed by him as well. Students would have real-life experiences outside the classroom and then develop those experiences into thoughtful ideas and finally, thought-provoking essays.

The first week of class we sat outside by a fountain on campus. We read various excerpts about the human connection to water. We read from A River Runs Through It, and Blue Minds. We talked about our best memories in nature and turned them into narrative essays. I published some of them on our website.

All was going well, until week eight. I had my first bomb threat. The fire siren went off. (We usually get a fire drill email reminder). Students reacted casually enough, until we got outside. Then, it was a myriad of police and dogs and ATF vehicles circling about. Even as a writer I find it difficult to organize and synthesize the emotions that channeled through my mind and body; my heart pounding through my chest, nausea, and fear so deep I could feel it in my toes. When I attempted to explain it later to a friend, I was met with “Well, that’s the world we live in. Don’t let it get you down”.

But how do I do that?

I was awake most of the night.

However, the next day while teaching at that same school, my anxiety about a person with a bomb, gun, whatever, was over-shadowed by a conversation I was about to have with my students.

Going into class I planned to address the bomb threat issue with my college freshman students. I had just read Mark Montgomery’s article, “Giving Away My Privacy”, and felt that my students would be comforted by my own nervousness. I anticipated fear on their part, or a general uneasiness. But when I asked about how they felt I was met with shoulder shrugs. “I am used to it”, one student said. Others shook their head in agreement and then a conversation ensued where students exchanged bomb threat scares and gunmen lockdown experiences as if they were telling fish stories.

It seemed that I was a lucky one, having taught for 10 years and only now, did I have my first bomb threat. It’s as if my students thought it was “cute”.

“Awww, your first scare. It's okay Mrs. H, you'll get used to it".

What do you do with that? ​​ I read their papers about their diagnoses of anxiety disorders and panic attacks…and depression. Sometimes while lecturing I can see how medicated they are; how anaesthetized they have become due to “the world we live in.”

There was something more too, but it seemed I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. So I forced myself back into the old systemic routines of the classic pedagogy and there I found that simplistic concept of reflection. I use it often when teaching students how to conclude an essay, however, I hadn’t used it as much as I should have in my own life. So I began, looking back over time at the classes I have taught. I remembered how my students have taught me, inadvertently, how to teach them. One thing that seemed to occur subtly enough for me not to catch was their interactions to each other. Over the 10 years things had shifted in a very positive way. The students who may have been considered “autistic” were no longer the isolated kid in the back. They fit in just as much as the obese students or the student who openly discussed her mental illness diagnosis. Kids weren’t as ostracized as they once were. They were all “clicking” together like one big mis-shaped, beautiful puzzle. Then it hit me. With all he violence happening in educational facilities, they now had a common enemy. Nothing forms a common bond, more than a common enemy. Something incredibly natural had unfolded before me. And by recognizing it, I was catapulted into the here and now. That place in time when you feel you are exactly right where you need to be and nothing feels better.

I am smart enough to understand that threats and scares won’t go away. I know writing an essay will not solve this issue. But, it’s another outlet where I can feel like at least I did something. The next two weeks are dedicated to yoga and meditation. I’m bringing in a yoga teacher, we are reading from Rumi and we are journaling (daily) about our gratitude. Research essays are due in a few weeks. Doing something always beats doing nothing. So, as a teacher, my students and I will deepen our understanding of meditation. We will increase our awareness and connection to nature. We will practice and engage in face to face conversation with each other. We will read Pema Chodron and together we will adapt to the changing world. I suppose this approach may sound off “hippie” alarms. I understand why. Yet, if my diversified classroom wasn’t so in tune, so punctual, and so hungry to write, then, well, I wouldn’t be taking time I don’t have to write and submit this essay. The opportunity to teach this class has re-ignited my love for teaching. And I believe that for my students they are being afforded a reconciliation of sorts, with themselves, to discover and wonder all over again.