Bullets just took another student's life and it doesn't make any sense.

[Alan Sitomer]

In addition to doing Professional Development for schools and districts, I also do student assemblies (with my YA author hat on.) And the truth is, while I like doing to adult events, the kids just smoke the grown-ups on the "fun for me" scale... it's not even close.

Anyway, I did a really cool, very well received student assembly last year at Wilson High School in Long Beach, CA. Essentially, a great teacher over there named Devon Day nudged and nudged me to come, and when I was able to make the schedule work, I did.

The kids were great. The staff was nice. All in all, it was pretty good stuff.

I only mention it because this is the same Wilson High that has been in the news lately... for all the wrong reasons. Tragically, one of their students was fatally shot and killed after their homecoming game. It was front page stuff out this way.

A big theme of mine that day was about choices and trying to advocate for education over violence. As the author of the popular YA book Homeboyz, a book many of their students had read and wanted to talk to me about til the cows came home, I feel it is essential to make sure kids are crystal clear as to why I wrote the book. It's a cautionary tale, violent and raw and all too real. Studnets, like moths to the flame, are entranced by gangs in this day and age but this stuff ain't no joke -- that's part of my presentations. Anway, Devon just sent me the following email as her school wrestles with how to move on in the aftermath of this tragedy.

Alan,

I am sure you have read all about the 11th grader here at Wilson High School that was shot and killed on October 30th after the Homecoming game. She died on route to the hospital but was shot at the cross walk coming into the C-side. Alan you've crossed it!

Tomorrow I am starting Homeboyz (Year 2 with your book). What a great piece of literature to get the students talking about the consequences of violence. I know I have some kids with street lives in my English classes this year. It will be an interesting time to get the students to open up and write about their experiences, especially with the recent death of Melody Ross. Tonight is a candle light vigil on the campus quad. We expect a huge turn out. I started with one class on Tuesday. I started out by reading parts of chapters one and two with the help of one of my returning students, Alejandro who loves to read out loud. When I told them they had to read the remaining pages to chapter 3 by themselves, nobody complained. I look forward to tomorrow's activities. I am still using your BookJam curriculum.

Hope all is well.

Devon

On one hand, I am thrilled that a great teacher like Devon finds my work worthy enough to bring into her own classroom to try and teach and reach her kids. On the other hand, I am sad and empty.

I mean I live under the delusion that when I do free assemblies like the one I did for Devon's school that it's because it's gonna make an impact and kids are gonna get it and things are going to change. Unfortunately, I do not have nearly the power I wish I did to help young people avoid the violence which plagues young America today.

It's depressing. No matter what I do I know that individually it will never be enough. (I mean, I am working on 4 hours of sleep as I type this right now and my voice is so raw from teaching and speaking I am scared of creating scar tissue on my vocal cords -- but I just haven't had a break for weeks).

And yet still, we forge on. What more can we all do but forge on? Not give in to cynicism and bitterness. Not turn to anger or hate. All I guess we can do is put one foot in front of the other.

My heart goes out to the family and friends of Melody Ross... and to the community of Long Beach Wilson. As adults in this world, we have got to find a way to do better by our kids.

Blame is easy. Solutions are a whole different matter.

This weekend, let's all remember that bullets just took another young student's life and no matter how much I think about it, it really just doesn't make any sense.

Good luck, Wilson High. Hope you know there are people in your corner everywhere even if you do not see them.

[Michael Umphrey]

No one has control of what is happening. It is the result of the hundred million decisions that taken together mark the decline of a culture—the teacher, lacking anything to say about his subject, who promotes an ideology instead; the publisher who cannot resist the payout from sensationalism and whips it into a dollar-frosted frenzy; the intellectually lazy reader who buys a prurient thriller, knowing that its effect is equivalent to a diet of gas-station junk food, "just for the plane ride"; the drug-addled Hollywood solons who have blurred the line between general films and pornography, and have created a new nonsexual pornography of hypnotic, purely sensational images, substituting stimulation and tropism for just about everything else (except popcorn); narrow intellectuals who mock the ethical precepts, religions, and long-held beliefs of civilizations that have evolved over thousands of years, in favor of theories of more or less everything that they have designed over an entire semester; writers who write according to neither their consciences nor their hearts, but to sell. Digital Barbarism--Mark Helprin

My sense is that more than hearing about choice, young people need to hear about moral and ethical dimensions of life that give choice meaning--a vision of a good order and why it matters and how they fit in it. If no such order exists around them, teaching it is extremely difficult.

In some places this may mean young people need to be rescued from public schools.

W.H. Auden in "Shield of Achilles":

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

My sense is that in a decadent culture, those who are repelled by the decadence need to find each other, joining in smaller communities that remain committed to ancient ideals of civilization. Such communities can do much to teach their children better ways.

But an individual in a large school without a true moral vision becomes a martyr quite quickly if he speaks and acts with too much clarity.

[Alan Sitomer]

And yet another twist. Look at what Devon just sent to me...

Alan,

Oh, I am dying. The shooter was in my class two years ago as a freshman. I can still see where he sat in my class. That was the year that I made the decision to start teaching non violence. That was the October I walked into your CATE presentation and decided I had to teach Homeboyz.

I wish I could have done more. They just published his picture in the Long Beach Post.

My seniors have already heard because they are all text messaging each other. Josh told me Tom was really bad. I guess he had quite the reputation.
What a frickin waste all around.

OWCH!!

[Alan Sitomer]

Thanks for the kind words. Deep down I guess we all know this stuff but still...

[Ramona Lowe]

Never, never doubt that you are being effective enough. Your efforts mattered a great deal the that group audience and even more to those who stayed to talk to you. We have no way to measure what doesn't happen because of an intervention, but that doesn't diminish its power (angels, karma, the Universe, whatever you believe in is taking notes). No doubt someone, somewhere is sitting in an office so apart from the world you inhabit that he might as well be atop Everest. And that person is trying to measure teacher effectiveness by analyzing a big pile of numbers that somehow correspond to another set of numbered items that are less than stones in a mosaic. And that person has been, and always will be totally in the dark about what makes an effective teacher. Effective teachers change lives and give hope--and you, my friend, do that in exponential ways.
It doesn't make sense that kids are being killed at school. It doesn't make sense that soldiers are killed by their own, either. So many things don't make sense, but caring for those in need always does.

[Lauren B.]

"And yet still, we forge on. What more can we all do but forge on? Not give in to cynicism and bitterness. Not turn to anger or hate. All I guess we can do is put one foot in front of the other."

You're a good man, Alan. I left the inner city after five years of teaching, mostly because I couldn't deal with the administration any more, but also because I didn't like the person I was becoming. I struggle with this a lot, because I feel like I have abandoned the kids who need me the most, but at the same time, I know that turning into a cynic would be no help to them either. I can only hope that my experiences color the way I teach now, and that my current students will be more compassionate adults than the people in power now.