the four year old wanted to play teacher tonight
so he turned off the light and closed the door and told me to “shhhh” because it was a lockdown and I had to be quiet
this is a drill we do for preschoolers now
anyway I’m going to go cry
My wife teaches at an inner city school and every time she even hints something's gone wrong I fear the worst.
It has not dulled over time.
It is not a healthy place to be. I'm sorry you had that moment. It had to be awful.
I don't know how you kept it together friend. Like this should be a part of a child's life anywhere in the world.
Hugs ❤️
ALT Text - GIF of a man crying on the couch 😭
My oldest started preschool in 2013. 1 year after Sandy Hook. This has been our reality. He texted me during a lockdown last month, “I don’t feel safe”. It’s madness. Hugs.
Sorry to say that but I had to think about that posting quite a while to understand.
In Germany, a lockdown is staying at home during a Covid-19 situation. Not like the thing mentioned here.
Part of the problem might be that in USA there are many, many, MANY more weapons than anywhere else.
Of course. Far fewer restrictions, far more cultural glorification of gun violence, and abundant reactionary opposition to any measure that might reduce gun deaths.
Our children are dying, and dying, and…nothing changes.
Weird & horrific.
I was born in the U.S., and raised here. I felt safer in E.U. countries where I knew very little of the language — and couldn’t find my way around without help — than I do here buying groceries, watching movies in a theater, or dancing at an LGBTQ club.
To be clear, we’ve had mass shootings in grocery stores here; and at cinemas and queer nightclubs and many other public places, indoors and out.
It’s simply that the school shootings are some of the most common, and the most terrifying. Our children grow up afraid, if they get to grow up.
And way less access to mental health resources. If a teacher in Germany notices a student is mentally ill they most likely have more than 1 no-cost place they can direct the parents to. That's not a thing in the US
we were in our junior year of high school when columbine happened.
our children have been taught to smear the blood of their dead classmates on themselves to make a more convincing corpse
our country fucked up the lesson so hard that we created an entirely new brand of trauma to suffer
And to abandon each other if they're down as they run for a classroom.
My kid couldn't stomach that and I had to tell him to do what he feels is right, I'd be proud of him no matter how it turned out.
Should never have to tell your kid that ever.
Only in America.
"If you die defending your friends at school" is just a fuckin heartbreaking thing to even think about, much less need to actually express because it's a very real possibility
He had just stopped to help a kid up who slipped because high school hallways are naturally not good running surfaces. And they told him to not stop, to keep going because "you could get hurt because you stopped".
He's autistic, and being told to leave them behind upset him more than "getting hurt"
“And to abandon each other if they're down as they run for a classroom.”. - Oh. My. God.
No child should even have to think about things like that as an actual, practical possibility. The USA is, in some ways, a very sick society.
I’ll never forget picking up my then second grader and him telling me what he learned that day was how to brace his back against the bathroom wall with his legs against the door in case there was a shooter at his school. I think I cried for a week. Tearing up even now. How can we do this?
this is by far one of my least favorite things about sending the kids to school
or the internal debate over "OK, they caught the kid making threats against the school last week, but is it safe to send them on Monday? what if he does it now?"
This is so fucking wrong, I can't even express how I feel about it.
Why do we let this continue? Why can't our children have educations that don't involve terrorizing them?
It’s horrible, when ivwas a child all i had to be afraid of in school was a crazy nun with a yardstick and getting under the desk before the nuclear bomb hit. The shootings are always younger males, why?
Imo, men are more socialised to be violent in general. And older folks probably don't see school as such a central place anymore as to warrant spreading violence there
I was just commenting about this in another thread! I remember my kid being really affected by their first drills in preschool. It made me white hot with rage that we’ve allowed this to be what the world is.
It's not the world, it's the USA, it's a problem literally every other first world country has worked to solve, it's a problem most americans want to and know how to solve. Yet here you are.
I am so sorry. No joke one of the worst days of my life was finding my kid (grade 1 I think it was) I *thought* playing with blankets on his bed. Asked him what he was doing he said "making a safe place for us to hide for when the bad people come to kill us". They'd had a lockdown drill that day.
My daughter’s after school program has already experienced 2 lockdowns on their early release days. They’re housed in the actual school. One in February and one in April.
K-5
😡❤️
