Anybody Shoot at You Today?

One of my ConVal High colleagues likes to tell a story about her first year as a teacher there. She used to come into the English office at the end of the day exhausted and distraught, sometimes on the verge of tears. One of the other teachers, a Vietnam combat veteran, asked her what was the matter.

‘I’ve had a bad day,’ she moaned.

‘Anybody shoot at you?’ he inquired. When she shook her head, he said, ‘Then it wasn’t such a bad day.’

It was bleakly funny then, but not anymore. Between 1996 and 2000, there were almost 600,000 reported incidents of violent crimes by students against teachers in the U.S. -- crimes like rape, sexual assault, robbery or aggravated assault. In the last year of the study, nine percent of all teachers were threatened with injury by a student, and four percent were physically attacked. Male teachers, and teachers in middle or junior high schools were the most likely victims of student violence.

The trend appears to be continuing, and even accelerating. Between September 2003 and February 2004, threats and assaults on teachers by elementary and high school students in Chicago public schools increased by

25 percent over the same period the year before.

Assailants are getting younger, too. In April, officials of the Jefferson County, Kentucky, public schools reported a sharp increase in incidents of student violence toward teachers in the elementary grades.

While suspensions for hitting staff members doubled for all grades between 1993 and 2003, the number of elementary grade students suspended for attacking teachers quadrupled.

I went looking for these figures because a teacher I know had a scary experience recently. She had given one of her students a lunch detention for some minor transgression. During his detention, he drew a picture of the teacher -- it was labeled with her name -- with a gunsight centered on her forehead. Then he used a red marker to drive holes through her face.

There may have been a time when adults could laugh off such a picture, but those times are over.

I’ve never been threatened or attacked by a student, although I’ve had close calls. One day in my first year, a freshman fired a water bottle into the floor at my feet and warned me not to come near him. And just a few weeks ago, I took a student out of class to find out why he had his head on his desk and was refusing to participate in discussion. Once we were out there, I could see how agitated he was. He was breathing hard, and he held one clenched fist tightly in his other hand, as if to restrain it from lashing out.

This happened to be a kid I like and respect. He’s having a tough time, but he’s doing his best. Speaking softly, I made a deal with him there in the hallway -- if he’d come back to class, I wouldn’t hassle him about participating. He didn’t say anything for a few seconds, then he let his hands drop and came back to class.

I was a little shaken by this encounter, but I guess it wasn’t such a bad day because he didn’t shoot at me. This time.