Kristen's Notes

One morning, 4 years ago, I was walking into work with a couple of coworkers. It was the kind of morning that is just quintessentially fall. The air was crisp and just slightly damp; there were a few scattered leaves on the ground, but not many, and they hadn’t had time to dry out and become crunchy yet. The group of us were laden down with our tote bags, water bottles, coffee cups, lunch boxes, and laptop cases, the way teachers always are at the beginning of the school year.

As we passed the dumpster area, one of the teachers stopped and said, “wait a minute, what is this?”

It was a bag of golf clubs leaned up against the dumpster. Not nice golf clubs, the bag was careworn and scuffed up in many places, and even my non-golfing self could tell that the set wasn’t complete. But we all converged on the golf clubs.

I chose a 9-iron, shifting my parcels and beverages until it was integrated with the rest of my school gear. The rest of my friends did similarly. And then as if we’d never broken, we resumed our walk, chatting about weekend plans, dinner recipes, and funny things our students had said the day before. Normal teacher stuff.

Upon reaching my classroom, I tucked my new golf club up high, onto the top of a bookshelf right next to my classroom door, resting on binders of curriculum where students would be unlikely to ever even know it was there. Across the building, my coworkers and friends were doing the same.

None of us were taking up golfing, we all saw in those golf clubs the same thing. A way to prepare our classrooms and protect our students should we ever need to.

As we go back to school, I think that it’s a good reminder to anyone who doesn’t spend time in our nation’s schools. We haven’t done anything to make school shootings less likely, so the logic follows that they will continue. And your child’s teachers? The same ones you are raging at for asking for pencils and glue sticks? They are making plans to defend your child should the need arise. My very earnest hope is that we all have a wonderful school year, but the statistics don’t lie and I know that that’s unlikely.

And despite my golf club, which is still always within reach, arming the teachers is not the solution. We could solve this the way that every other country has: with legislation. But only if we start prioritizing our kids over guns, and our futures over our machismo.