Rambling

I usually have an idea for a post or two floating around in my head.  But not now.  For the last couple of weeks I can't think of anything I have wanted to tell the world, except for the less than 140 character Facebook posts I have put out.  So I thought I  may just ramble today and see where it takes me...

I have just finished reading Wally Lamb's The Hour I First Believed.  It is the story of a husband-wife who happen to be teachers in Columbine High when the shooting occurred.  The events are true, but the characters are fictional.  I was wondering how he could pull off a fictional story about this subject without making it hokey.  But, overall I enjoyed it.  His writing is well researched and is logical, something the left-brained me appreciates.  However, there was something about this book that wasn't quite there.  It was as if there were two books/stories and neither could work alone, but neither could work together.

The subject matter has made me think about the people and places I trust my children to.  Like school.  We are in a society that pays lip service to safety, but do they really do it?  Both of my boy's school buildings have a buzz-in system.  One cannot enter unless they buzz the office and sign in when they walk past.  But in reality, have the secretaries really ever gotten out of their chairs to see who just walked past the office without signing in?  And the sign in book is outside the office door-it is there to appease the safety gods, but not really monitored quite well?  I wonder what would happen if one of the ladies buzzed someone in who did not sign the log and just went busting down the hallway.  Would they even stop the person or try to find out where they went?  I know that there are children in both buildings that have alerts on their folders and I wonder how these alerts are handled.

Also, have adults gotten off their duffs enough to check on the warning signs of such violence?  In the book, he mentions that both of the shooters wrote essays about blowing away other people with huge guns.  One even did a video for a class that depicted such violence.  The teachers saw this, and graded it.  But it seems that it never went further than this.  How can we let that happen?

Now I am not saying this horrible incident could have been avoided by questioning those two boys.  They had evil in their hearts for quite a while.  But, are the adults I entrust my children to capable of dealing with this?  I know that I would have to go to counselling to use the right words when confronting such writing.  I know that I have lead a sheltered life in such that I have not had to deal with more than the garden variety of bad things.  Severely bad things like this make me twitch, and I am a teacher by trade.  Would I ignore it?

After seeing LegoMaster's class and having another teacher question me on how he is doing ("Yeah, I heard that class was a difficult one." she said), I have begun to wonder.  What are my boys being exposed to at school?  Have they been having other boys threaten them, then laugh?  Have they been feeling uncomfortable? What bothers me is that I cannot prevent this from happening.  I think every parent wants their children to be happy and healthy.  But what if we can't?  What if their destiny is one of sorrow?  How can I teach them how to cope with that?

Dark ramblings on a dark and rainy day.....