making sense of the senseless

I've been working with kids for a long time. As a childcare professional I've gone through a lot of safety trainings and every time I hope to never have to use them. I think I'll be rereading my notes this weekend. I'm sensitive in ways that may not be obvious right away. I tear up at CPR training sometimes because I can't help but imagine scenarios where a knowledge of CPR might prove useful. When sitting through a safety training I imagine what it might feel like in an actual emergency. I'm thinking about the steps: shelter-in-place is announced, lock the doors, move away from the windows, huddle all 40 kids inside the kitchen and wait for the all clear. But that could never happen at my program. I'm sure the teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary thought it could never happen at their school, until it did. And I can't help but try to imagine myself in their shoes as they remembered their safety training. Active shooter on campus. Never mind how much those words should never have to be spoken at an elementary school. But they acted fast and bravely and kept their students safe, and I can't imagine what they must be feeling now knowing that they survived and other didn't.

Everyone is trying to make sense of it and figure out who to blame. Guns or mental illness or some combination of factors. How to prevent this from ever happening again. It doesn't make sense, though. Senseless acts of violence are like that. 

I was reading about this shooting before work today, just a few minutes before I went out to meet my kids after school. I was reading about it and holding back tears as I listened to my coworkers talk about Youtube videos. It was in the back of my mind all day. I was thinking about this and the senseless act of violence that happened in my neighborhood Wednesday night when two teenage boys shot a man over an argument about sports. Senseless. Violence. 

I was thinking about it when I saw a group of sixth graders throwing clumps of dirt at a group of fourth graders playing soccer, and when one of those clumps of dirt hit a boy in the face and he started walking toward me crying, and when I almost lost my cool and raised my voice at the sixth graders that this shit has got to stop. Kids throwing dirt at each other is not the worst thing they could be doing, for sure. But the attitude that it's no big deal is what bothers me. They'll say they're just playing, but somebody inevitably gets hurt and my job is to keep them safe while they're in my care.

The news about the shooting in Connecticut had not reached my elementary schools kids by this afternoon and we were asked not to bring it up so their parents could address it with them first, but I'm sure it will be a topic of conversation on Monday. I hope it will be an opportunity to talk about the point I've been trying to get through to them all year, which is simply don't hurt each other.