Good grief it has been a while since I've touched this blog! It has been a rough year, and I've not felt much like writing. I do hope that the rough is going away and along with it whatever it was that has kept me from writing. The following is a very abbreviated article on what I feel would go a long way in actually making our schools safer. Enjoy!
In Arkansas, teachers are required to
attend and satisfactorily complete 60 hours of professional
development every year. One might assume, and one might be correct
to think that more than a few of those 60 hours are spent
intellectually detached from the subject at hand (thank God for
smartphones). Each year I have struggled with the question, “What
offerings can I actually benefit from this summer?” It was the
summer of 2012 that I actually took some PD that was meaningful: a
trip to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in sunny San Diego.
This experience began with a colleague
asking me if I wanted to go to San Diego and shoot an M4 for PD this
summer. I thought he was joking at first. But after that
conversation and an email with the registration forms attached I
started to get excited about some PD that would be useful. At least
to a gun lover like me.
“It's Always Sunny in San Diego”
After a warm welcome and a fun
meet-a-marine dinner on the night of our arrival, we teachers from
Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas were enthusiastically encouraged to
leave a bus to stand on the yellow
footprints so many young men (all males at MCRD- females go to Parris
Island, NC) who have earned the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor have stood.
A short while later we were given a card that said we had survived
the first two minutes of a Marine recruit's visit to MCRD. A
feeling of insignificance overwhelmed me. That, and a deep respect
for those men whose spit and words were flying at me moments before.
The week turned out to be an education
in the Corps of today-- the recruits they are looking for, the
benefits they offer to all recruits, dispelling false myths of what
it means to be a Marine, and a fairly transparent and vast look at
the tools they use around the office.
“Range Day”
It began to occur to me on the day of
our trip to the range that the profession of education was not
inhabited by educators. We have become something else-- CYA
specialists, propagandists-- anything but teachers. The real
teachers were the Drill Instructors who took a group of fat, old, and
in some cases unbelievably obtuse “teachers” who had never held a
firearm in their lives to the range and taught them the rules of the
range, how to operate the M4, and finally how to shoot the thing and
hit what you are shooting. It was by far the coolest day of PD ever.
By the way, I think there was an underlying theme coming from those
DIs that while they can make a Marine out of what we are sending
them, we aren't exactly excelling at our job...
My friend and I were able to post pie
plate sized groups shooting from a prone position from 200 yards with
our scoped M4s. Then we found out that at 200 yards the Marines only
stand or kneel to qualify, and the optics are relatively new in their
acceptance for qualifying. After our session a female Marine who, as
I recall was three sheets to the wind at the hotel bar the night
before, shot a fist sized group of ten rounds from the same
distance.... Did I mention that every Marine is a Marksman first?
“Something Like Scales Fell Off”
That PD is history for me. But the
lesson gained from that one range day was more than just “tips for
better shooting.” What I realized was that every teacher needs this
day of PD. Heck, we need a week of this PD every year. Every
teacher. Every administrator.
The Marine's Educators Workshop was a
plush (at times!) all expenses paid vacation where we got to play
soldier (at times!) and become a first level recruit filter for them.
Their goal is to have a few teachers in every high school who can be
a positive link between them and potential recruits. What our
schools need, and I cannot emphasize this too much, is firearms
training and close quarters combat training for every teacher. Full
stop. When we wait for the “good guys” people die. When we
confront fast moving lead with flesh, the lead wins. Every time. How
high is the body count going get before we do something that might
actually make a difference?
