Are You Mad, Sad, Glad, or Afraid?

      Are you mad, sad, glad, or afraid? We ask our students that all the time, when they are struggling to deal with big emotions.  But does anyone ask us those same questions when we're dealing with big emotions?

    A six year old boy takes a loaded gun into his first grade classroom. Gets it from his backpack and shoots his teacher.  He's SIX!!  He's in FIRST freaking grade!! How does that even compute?  How does a first grader even know to get a gun, take it to school, and then shoot someone? How?

    Am I mad. sad, glad, or afraid?  I can tell you what I'm not. I'm not glad. That teacher's life is forever changed. any children who were in class and witnessed the shooting lives are changed. The child's life is forever changed.

     I am mad. I am mad that a six year-old child knew where he could access a gun, knew how to use it, took it to school, and intentionally shot his teacher. I'm also mad that the adults in that six year-old's home didn't have the gun secured.  I'm mad that the school didn't have proper safety measures in place to prevent any weapon from being brought into the school.  With school shootings getting more and more common, it surprises me that there were not safety measures in place, nor did the school have it's own school resource officer.  Districts need to do more to protect the safety of their students and faculty.

     I am sad. I am sad that a dynamic teacher, who loved her job, was standing in front of her class of young students and was shot by one of them. Again...the shooter was SIX.YEARS.OLD.  No one expects a six year-old to shoot their teacher. Sadly, that's where we are now, as a nation. Kids with access to video games that are nor age-appropriate, who are too young to tell fact from fiction, that a video game is just that, a game.  Children's brains are not yet developed enough to differentiate the game from reality. I am sad that some parents don't monitor what games their kids are playing closely enough to prevent this.

     I am afraid.  What I am seeing in the classroom in the past few years is children who are angrier and angrier.  Children who struggle more and more with the boundaries set forth in school buildings.  More and more kids are dysregulated. Something has to change and that change needs to be drastic and dramatic.  Otherwise, I am afraid that situations such as the one that happened last week will continue happening.