When Teachers Fear the Students They Must Protect (The Atlantic)

I published an article in The Atlantic today, When Teachers Fear the Students They Must Protect.

I had turned 18 years old two weeks prior to April 20, 1999. I was looking ahead to starting college, to setting out on my own, and to buying a prom dress—to living. While I vaguely understood that mass shootings took place, I was detached from them as a real possibility. Then the Columbine shooting occurred at a high school in Littleton, Colorado, taking away the lives of 13 innocent people. That day, the realization sunk in that death could come not despite being in school, but because of it.

Eight years and numerous mass shootings later, the Virginia Tech massacre again shook me out of complacency. On that April morning in 2007, 32 people were killed on campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, in what remains the deadliest shooting rampage by a single gunman in U.S. history. As the coverage unfolded and the cellphones of the dead infamously continued to buzz, I—a graduate student instructor in Philadelphia still new to the job—prepared to teach my own class of freshmen and sophomores, 18- and 19-year-olds who were confronting the same reality that I had faced at their age: that schools and universities, places of growth and possibility, had become fair game.

READ THE ARTICLE ON THE ATLANTIC