S ince I started teaching six years ago, I’ve become more interested in gray areas. Maybe it’s because dealing with students seems to highlight all the complex ways in which a simple plan can break down. I sometimes have fantasies about what it’s like to be that teacher who’s seen it all — the dude who came to the final exam inebriated, the student who offered sex for a grade change. What would it be like to take all of that in stride?
A recent incident in my classroom has me thinking about the ways in which the randomness of the universe is always sort of poking at us as educators.
Growing up in Virginia, I belonged to a family with guns. They were used for hunting and trap shooting. I can’t remember ever not knowing where both the shotgun (a Browning over and under with the most lovely filigree you ever saw), and the rounds (little red tubes with shiny, cupped copper bottoms) were stored. They were in separate locations, as per standard gun-safety practices, but eventually they both disappeared. At some point my mother let it be known that she had gotten rid of them.
My father, you see, suffered from terrible manic-depressive episodes and my mother eventually had heard enough about the risk of suicide that she instituted gun control in our household. My father died of natural causes when I was in college and I always kind of quiver in my heart when I think about what my mother did. I’m glad I didn’t lose him earlier to suicide. To have known him less time than I did, which by now is less than half of my lived life, would have been hard.
“Sarah” was a very nice young woman who turned up in one of my classes a year or so ago. Her academic abilities were not strong but she had great energy and was a class leader. Definitely a process, and not a content, type of gal. I did take special notice of her on the first day during a sharing activity we typically do at the beginning of my science lecture courses. Sarah shared that the most notable experience of her winter break was a visit to a gun range where she had fired an AK-47. I gave the usual “very good, moving on” response but was thinking, “Whoa, that’s disturbing.”
When I was in college, we had this thing called the Santa Shoot. At the end of the semester you could bring your old books and tests to the firing range and “take out your frustration.” The Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a championship shooting team at the time (late ‘90s) and the Santa Shoot was a great fund raiser. MIT had to stop it, though, because people were starting to bring pictures of their professors (and their girlfriends) on which to take out their frustrations. Like many things at MIT, it got a little weird — and dark. (I just checked though — now it’s a video game.)
Other students in my classes have mentioned machine guns and firing ranges. I work in what you might call a red-meat type of area. The National Rifle Association puts up a big billboard advertising its annual pancake breakfast in a lot just a block from our campus. Other billboards advertise local shooting ranges. In our small city, we have three different gun shops (not counting chain stores) and seven gun ranges all within a 20-minute drive from the campus. This is what people do in their free time here: guns and pancakes. Welcome to America, professor.
Later, when Sarah was a student in another one of my courses, I overheard her confiding that she was looking forward to getting her concealed-carry permit. (Disclosure: I don’t teach in Texas.) I hadn’t known we had such permits in our state but apparently we do. Or did. Students could legally come to the campus armed until recently, when our legislature banned weapons from all state university campuses.
Last year at some point, Sarah said she was applying to a teacher-credential program and asked me for a recommendation. Initially I said yes because I usually do. I don’t know the exact date she asked, but I am thinking it must have been before the Umpqua Community College shooting last October because that’s when I really started thinking about students and guns. After Umpqua, colleagues and others specifically asked me if I felt safe on the campus and I had to think about that question. Our college’s “shelter-in-place” drills — in which whole buildings practice for an active-shooter situation — have not made me feel safe. I also did not feel safe during a visit to the campus police station where I was offered a free gun-safety lock.
How can I say that I don’t want to support students who are gun enthusiasts, without getting put on some sort of list?
For a long time, Sarah didn’t follow up about the recommendation. Recently, however — with at least 14 more people dead and 17 more injured in college campus shootings — she emailed me again, updating me on her plans and repeating her request.
I lay all of this out here now because I don’t know what to do about the recommendation.
It’s so complicated. On one side are all of my ideas about supporting students, honoring their individuality and their journeys, creating a safe space for them (and myself), not taking things out of context, not overinterpreting. On the other side are my memories of growing up in a situation where guns, people, and bullets had to be rigorously kept apart, lest they find each other in a tragic moment of instability.
She seems to be a good kid, Sarah. And I don’t know what she really thinks of gun advocacy and political failures that have cost us all these lives and our sense of safety as educators. I don’t know what she does on the weekends. I also don’t know if she understands emotions, or what real rage feels like. It seems to me no person who has truly experienced the full impact of their own emotions would ever go near a gun.
So what do I do? Do I write her a recommendation because I originally said yes? Do I say no and explain myself? Do I ignore her email?
Certainly my predicament raises the whole issue of what letters of recommendation mean. But this whole thing just feels so, so … so much like creeping up the attic stairs, unzipping the padded case and running my fingers over the tendrilled grooves etched into the barrel of that old Browning shotgun. Peering down the chamber, I didn’t know how to say it then, but tools for killing will always be sacred.
How can I say that I don’t want to support students who are gun enthusiasts, without getting put on some sort of list? You know — Santa Shoot 2.0. I mean, she’s applying to a teacher-credential program, for God’s sake. I wish the way forward was more black and white to me — that I knew what to do in this situation. But I don’t.
