“Maybe teachers should purchase Depends underwear,” a colleague said at our high school English department meeting on Dec. 17. We were gathered on Zoom, the day after Evanston Township High School in Evanston, the largest public high school under one roof in the U.S., spent several hours on lockdown when two loaded guns were found inside the school.
My colleague mentioned it might be a good idea to have a box of adult diapers in our classrooms because so many students had to use the bathroom during the three hours they were hiding in the corners of their dark, locked classrooms, away from the windows and barricaded doors, scared for their lives.
Everyone was wearing a mask, too, while they hid, because we are still in a pandemic. Luckily, Illinois is one of the states that has a mask mandate in schools.
“I’ll add Depends to my list of school supplies I buy,” another teacher replied flatly in the Zoom chat, deflated, as we all were, by the ominous reality that we need to prepare for future lockdowns. But we also knew how fortunate we were. The guns were found in time, no one was hurt, we were safe. Other schools, not so much.
According to the news source Education Week, which tracks the frequency of school shootings, there have been 24 school shootings since Aug. 1. The Nov. 30 shooting at Oxford High School in Oxford, Michigan, where four students were fatally shot, was the deadliest school shooting since 2018. The only reason school shootings were down during 2020, we can presume, was because learning was remote. Schools weren’t safer. They were closed.
Recently, our high school closed again, not because of the lockdown, but because of a COVID-19 outbreak. We took what’s called an “adaptive pause,” holding school remotely while local health officials assessed the outbreak.
Most of the students and teachers I spoke to said they were relieved to hear we were going remote, because of the COVID-19 outbreak that for days had been spreading through the 4 miles of hallways in our school — but also because we got to take a break from worrying about another lockdown.
Days after the Feb. 14, 2018, shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida, in which 14 students and three faculty members were killed, President Donald Trump said teachers around the country should receive bonuses to carry guns. I read about this minutes before my class started, and I became sick. My heart was racing at 148 beats a minute, I learned later, once I drove myself to the emergency room at the hospital, worried I was having a heart attack. The doctor gave me anti-anxiety medication and sent me home.
School shootings were on the rise then, yet that already feels like a long time ago. I was embarrassed for freaking out. I realize now that day marked the culmination of how much teaching has changed, how much more on guard and worried we are every day we enter our schools while trying to move our students through our curricula and be there for them in so many ways.
Students, teachers, staff and administrators have shown relentless strength. We have adapted, over and over again. Immediately, we moved to remote learning. Then hybrid. Then back to in-person. Then remote again. We will be back to in-person in January. We have been wearing masks in school all day, every day, since we returned last April. We have had discussions about the literature we’re reading in masks, played games in masks, held one-on-one conferences in masks, cried in masks, joked in our masks that the table in my classroom that used to hold food on Fridays is now the permanent home for the industrial-size jug of hand sanitizer. We’ve taken bets on how long it will last before we need a new one.
“It’s like throwing a wet blanket over the entire classroom,” a colleague said to me, frustrated about how tiresome it is for students and teachers to be in a mask. Yet we have done it. We have done so much. And we are exhausted.
To say that students haven’t learned much over the last three years, as many have argued, is an insult to what they have been through. Students have become far more adaptable, flexible and resilient than I’ve ever seen in my 20 years of teaching. Once the lockdown ended, we received an email from our union president who commented how well — “too well” — our students handled the scary situation. “It’s sad we live in a time where they know exactly what to do when the lockdown call comes on,” his email stated, “without missing a beat like it’s second nature.”
A teacher’s school supplies used to include things like books, pencils, folders, markers, posters and Post-its of various sizes. Many of us keep granola bars and other food items for students who come to us hungry. Now, on top of the sanitation equipment we all need, some of us will be adding Depends to that list.
But we are lucky, we are so very lucky, many of us repeated to each other as we left the building recently. Amid all the absurdity, we are so very fortunate, indeed.
Liz Shulman is an English teacher at Evanston Township High School.
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