# Until I Knew Them By [Keys](https://paragraph.com/@keys) · 2022-05-28 --- **Every teacher in America, at some point in their tenure as shepherds of today’s children, comes to understand that they may one day, without warning, and without any time to consider it, have to answer the question: Will they jump in front of bullets to protect a child? Other people’s children? Children they hardly knew? Children I hardly know.**  Until I knew them. * * * I worked as a substitute teacher in a science class during the last portion of this year. I started substituting because I needed a job, but I stayed in one class because I needed these children to feel loved. To feel stable. To feel that someone cared about them and their education. Now I didn’t always do a great job following through with these kids, but I came to love them all the same. These kids were TROUBLED. But I would dare to state that all children in America today are TROUBLED. After Covid and a year or two at home: no socialization, trapped in their parent’s houses, with little or no structured learning, fear around every corner, unmasked strangers going Karen in grocery stores, fights breaking out among adults they watch, hate boiling up and hissing out under the lid of every community, disinformation rampant, and the talking heads, red-faced and blaring at them from radios and TV screens everywhere… then suddenly they’re thrown back into school and asked to play nice, to learn good, to act their age.  What age? They stopped going to school two years ago. I had 7th graders that didn’t know how to write their own last name, much less a coherent sentence, seemingly stuck in 5th grade, having none of the learning that would have happened in the interim. Asking for more than one-word answers is like pulling teeth without novocaine. So what age are they anyway? We are all in new territory here. These specific kids had had their science teacher quit on them partway through March, because their behavior was simply too much, too egregious for their teacher to even continue. Quit! Because they were so ill-behaved.  And they were. I remember watching cartoons as a kid, where all manner of objects were flying through the air over the cartoon student’s heads, spitwads and liquids soaring, students reclining on counters and standing on tables, paper airplanes screaming over their heads, huddled groups of mean girls, plotting who would be out of the club, other kids saying, “guess who’s gay!?” in hushed voices, as the student in question comes into the classroom, yelling about gossip and “Gina said you’re saying something about me!,” students bringing snacks for after school sports and having those snacks stolen by a student just back from a suspension, and when the teacher retrieves those snacks and threatens to take said student to the office, is told by the thieving student that if they weren’t in school, teacher would get what’s coming to him, he’d get slapped in the face… And the teacher suddenly wonders if he _is_ in a cartoon, and yes at some point, maybe even the very beginning of the description, this has been a true-to-life, unvarnished, not-larger-than-life description of a single day as a science teacher in a suburban, midwest classroom in America, 2022.  * * * The children of our country are in CRISIS. They have not been able to grow as they should, and are now forced into socialization in a society that has spent 2 years ignoring them for their own good, but making sure that an 18 year old who has been threatening school shootings on social media for the previous weeks can walk into a gun store and walk out with 2 assault rifles. * * * It was when the student threatened to slap me that I started thinking about kids with guns. I thought about it for days straight. And what I suddenly realized, back in April, while watching a 4th grade teacher masterfully lead a class through lesson on Mowgli and _The Jungle Book_, a day after I sat in on a Language Arts class, where they were reading a book on two children in the holocaust, one a prisoner of Dachau, the other a young boy forced to work on the other side as a guard… what I realized for the first time was that:  THERE IS NOT A SINGLE TEACHER IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY WHO HASN’T FACED THE QUESTION:  WOULD I JUMP IN FRONT OF BULLETS FOR KIDS I HARDLY KNOW? What about my family, far away? What about my partner? Would he want to get the call? Would he want me never to come home again? My mother teaches 7th grade Language Arts on the other side of the country, her first year after almost 20 teaching 4th grade, and one of her troubled students works at a gun range.   Would I want that call regarding HER? Would I want my niece and nephews to never know another day with her, without me on this Earth? All my dreams, all my hopes for life and my loved ones, gone in a second because a broken country can’t get it together long enough to take care of a problem killing our children, when they die this way nowhere else on our planet? Well, none of that matters when it comes to the moment of decision. Would I do it? Would I jump? Would I save someone else’s child and sacrifice any chance of ever continuing in this life and maybe having my own children one day? And here I think of Marcella. A quiet, Mickey-mouse-ear-haired 8th grader, who wants to be a veterinarian, but could just as easily be the particle physicist who discovers time travel, or teleportation, or quantum gravity, or the theory of everything, whose whole life is gleaming out in front of her, whose worksheets, when others turn in nothing, are viscerally scrawled with notes, and answers, and amazingly prescient questions about the scientific world around us, who sits quietly while in the classroom while World War III rages around her, who leaves slightly early to go tell her 3rd and 4th grade siblings they will be car-riders today, who represents the best in all our children… It is when I think of her that my decision is as clear as her bright, innocent brown eyes, gazing at the equations on the board.  And I’ve decided. And it’s harrowing. But I’m not going to tell you what I’ve decided, because if I did, I’m either a piece of shit (if I decided no), or I’m pretending valor which I haven’t earned (if I decided yes), BECAUSE IT HASN’T HAPPENED TO ME. But 4 days ago it happened to two more of our educators in Texas. And this is why I say that every teacher in America has already answered this question. Because they are forced to by this cruel country. Because time waits for no one. Because the NRA waits for no tragedy. They met yesterday as the sun rose, its scarlet penumbra illuminating yet another bloodbath in our land, their pride brazenly clinging to their 19th century, colonizing cowboy image, because it stokes the bottom line, because it feeds their god - CASH - and they’re still murdering the colored and indigenous people on the prairie, just like they did 100 years ago, only this time -  \-  WE KNOW BETTER AND WE CAN STOP HISTORY FROM REPEATING ITSELF, ONLY WE’RE TOO LATE THIS TIME BECAUSE WE LET THEM TURN THE LAST ONE INTO A CARNIVAL OF LIES WHILE WE SAT BACK AND DID NOTHING, HOPING IT WOULDN’T BE OUR CHILDREN NEXT, THAT IT WOULDN’T BE US NEXT! -   Four days ago, in a little town in Texas, a modern cowboy gunman entered a school and mowed down 19 OF OUR LITTLE MARCELLA’S, and two of our teachers had to finish answering the question that I’ve only started asking, once I realized the question was inevitable. Now those two teachers lie dead with 19 children, most aged 10 and under, whom they heroically protected. Each of them died as heroes, but the family of Fourth Grade teacher, Irma Garcia, who “sacrificed herself protecting the kids in her classroom,” has suffered even more unspeakably. On Friday, her husband died of a heart attack, of a broken heart, because his high school love and mother of his children was now a corpse, leaving their four children to pick up the pieces of their lives without them. These now parentless children, and the 21 grief-stricken families of the victims of this latest mass-shooting, and the maligned families of Sandy-Hook, and every person that has been touched by any of these tragedies, have to go on living in this shattered country.  They beg us to DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT.  The question these two teachers had to answer that day, and mine as a continuing teacher, looms in front of me like crimson smear of blood, as it does for every single educator in America, and for every janitor, and for every principal, and for every parent who gives freely of themselves each day and volunteers at our understaffed and underserved schools from California to Texas, from New York to Alabama.  Will they jump in front of bullets? For kids they hardly know? For kids I hardly knew? _Until I knew them._ For God’s sake, let us build a country where no still-beating, human heart ever has to ask this question of themselves, or answer it, ever again. --- *Originally published on [Keys](https://paragraph.com/@keys/until-i-knew-them)*