Small Strokes Big Oaks

I’m on the Teaching Tolerance blog today, talking about what you can say to your students after a tragedy strikes. Unfortunately, in my six short years of teaching, this is already becoming something I need to think about every year. Check it out:

The day after Valentine’s Day 2008, I watched my 1^st period students file into the room. They were uncharacteristically quiet. When the bell rang, they all looked at me, waiting to hear how I might make sense of the previous night’s tragedy when Steven Philip Kazmierczak opened fire in Cole Hall on Northern Illinois University’s campus, shooting 21 people and killing five.

It was my second year of teaching, and already this sort of thing was becoming routine. The year before, we watched the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history unfold at Virginia Tech. In 1999, when I was a high school freshman, I’m sure my own teachers were similarly daunted by classrooms full of wide-eyed students after the Columbine High School shooting, more than 900 miles away.

The NIU shooting was different, though; it was practically in our backyard. This was no longer the sort of thing that happened somewhere else. My students had siblings on campus. I had several close friends there. We were all exhausted from a long night of phone calls, text messages and watching the news for updates.

I looked at my students. I wanted to help them understand why someone would do something so heinous, but I didn’t understand it myself. I took a deep breath and said the first thing that came to mind: “It’s not fair. You go about your lives and you never know what might happen or if you’re going to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. School is a place where you are supposed to feel safe, and now that has been taken away from you.”

Read the rest of the article at Teaching Tolerance. 

I’m curious: how do you handle tragedies with your students or your children? What do you say to them to either ease their minds or help them make positive out of the negative?