On Being Tired
In my 16-year career as a high school teacher, I have been through more lockdowns than I can count
There’s a bucket in my classroom.
It’s bright yellow plastic with a sturdy black lid. It’s large. It looks like any one of the industrial sorts of buckets you might find in the aisles of Home Depot or in the dusty disarray of a construction site. It lives under my desk, just between a box of printer paper and a crate of student portfolios, and it has been there since 2013. It goes mostly unnoticed from day to day. It’s just a bucket, after all.
In my 16-year career as a high school teacher, I have been through more lockdowns than I can count. Neighborhood shootings, nearby police activity, external threats, and rumor-driven caution have all been past prompters for lockdowns to be enacted. The lockdown alarm at my school is awful — which is fitting. It’s a wall-jarring screech that sends students cowering from its racket even before they have a chance to process its meaning. The students crouch down, away from the floor-to-ceiling windows, and all of their fear and their questions collect in a dense cloud above, pressing down on us with invisible force, rendering us wide-eyed and breathless. It feels like choking.
It’s exhausting.
In the past two weeks, there have been multiple incidents of firearms discovered on my school’s campus. None have been brandished or used. We’ve been lucky.
Sometimes (many times) I think about how I would protect my students if there was an active shooter at our school. I think about the fire extinguisher hanging next to the door and how it might be sprayed or heaved at an armed attacker. I think about the weight of the chairs and desks in my room and wonder how quickly we could push and stack to create a barricade from the snarl of metal and plastic. I think of the fact that most students don’t get cell service in my classroom, which would make it difficult for them to make phone calls or send text messages to their loved ones. I think about what I would do in that razor-thin edge of a moment if I found that I was only thing standing between my students and unimaginable harm.
This morning as I was getting ready for work, I looked in the mirror and thought, “Today could be the day. Today our luck could run out.” I found myself wondering whether this would this be the last thing I ever wear. I found myself wondering — did any of the students or teachers at Oxford High School look in the mirror before heading to school or work and think these very same thoughts?”
Logical folks will tell me that I’m far more likely to die in a car accident or from cancer. They’re right. I know this because I am “logical folks” most of the time. But the logical part of my brain is also the part responsible for telling me to wear a seatbelt and obey traffic laws, and to exercise and eat well. The logical part of my brain is the part that wants to plan for the worst because the logical part of my brain knows that unlikely doesn’t mean impossible. This fear isn’t consuming me from the inside out; it’s not keeping me from living my life. Still, every time there’s coverage of another shooting, it’s impossible not to wonder if my students will be the next to say, “We never thought it could happen to us.”
The high school where I teach is a loud and cavernous place. Our students are vibrant and resilient and energetic. The hallways echo with student laughter, door slams, rail taps, thundering footfalls, and the occasional curse word. Every so often, a student will think it’s funny to pound heavily on classroom doors as they skitter by on a bathroom break, and entire classes will seize and jerk with a collective gasp, like any and all composure has been sucked from the room. They’re more than just startled. It takes several moments for them to recover from that split-second surge of belief that it could be happening to them.
Those yellow buckets appeared in our classrooms in January of 2013. That was eight years ago. That was the month after Adam Lanza murdered 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
We were tired then.
That yellow bucket opens. The flat lid flips on black plastic hinges, revealing what looks like a donut-shaped seat. Inside the bucket is an assortment of survival necessities that seem more appropriate to the debris-strewn wake of a natural disaster than a brightly lit public school classroom: a tarp, rope, plastic bags, first aid supplies, dehydrated food items, water, and a variety of other worse-case-scenario items. The bucket, one realizes upon further examination, is meant to double as a toilet in an emergency situation. The words LOCKDOWN KIT scream in glossy capital letters across the curved plastic. It’s a clever concept in its multifunctionality, but it seems oddly incongruous in a classroom setting. It’s unsettling.
Then again, this is the USA.
Most of the time I can forget these fears. They rest in the back of my mind, in a listless state of dormancy, and they go unnoticed for extended periods of time. I don’t constantly fret or worry. I do frequently lose myself in the joyous chaos of the typical day, and those sleeping fears allow my thoughts to linger decadently on Shakespeare or Steinbeck or Cisneros or Baldwin.
But every so often as I’m returning to my desk to check an email or edit a student’s grade, I see that yellow bucket.
Then I’m tired all over again.
