Two students had just finished reciting “If” by Rudyard Kipling. They set a timer and asked their classmates to do some preliminary analysis on the poem by identifying the speaker, subject, tone, and such.
5 minutes.
I stepped toward the classroom window and gazed at the leaves on the trees. I was glad to see green rather than snow. I thought about whether it was time to retire Kipling’s poem given his view on colonialism. I thought about how the tree outside my living room window had once been full of leaves but was now leafless. I thought of the student sitting two feet away from me and how he still hates reading. I blamed myself. I thought of coffee.
And then I noticed the top of the flag pole standing flagless between the two trees proudly displaying their leaf-filled branches in the wind of this Friday morning. My eyes wandered a bit lower. Flag half-mast.
I looked around the room to see who was mostly done with their preliminary poem notes.
“Hey,” I said kneeling on the carpet. “How are you?”
“Good. Tired,” he said.
“Soccer practice?”
He nodded.
“Math test today?”
He nodded.
“Um, do you know why our flag is at half-mast?”
“The shooting in Colorado. Another school shooting.”
I nodded.
The timer was at 3:30 now.
I knew about the school shooting. Kendrick Castillo was fatally shot and eight others were hospitalized. The school had received an anonymous call from a parent expressing concerns. I remembered reading that the parent said the school had a high “drug culture” and was a “high pressure environment.” I thought of Columbine. April 20, 1999. I thought of the school shooting at Arapahoe High School. December 13, 2013. I thought of the shooting at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. April 30, 2019.
His eyes looked away from mine, back toward his screen. He began highlighting the “if” at the beginning of each line of the poem. Then he clicked “comment” and noted that it was anaphora and typed “all the conditions the speaker wanted his son to consider.”
If.
I realized I as still kneeling, so I stood up. I watched at the two students who read the poem move around the room checking their classmates’ notes. I watched as they smiled and spoke kind words of encouragement. I watched the timer count down to the last second.
And then I walked toward the window, our flag flying at half-mast. “If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you…” If.
Maybe flying flags at half-mast has created a numbing effect. Are we really in a mourning or respect mode if we’re always in a mourning or respect mode? I think the way it works is that someone requests in all good faith for flags to fly at half mast, and it’s politically impossible to turn it down. But because there are so many requests the flags are frequently at half mast, and it that gesture has become somewhere between maudlin and meaningless.
Thank you for this point, Gary. At first, I hadn’t noticed it was at half-mast, and that is, perhaps, because it is so frequently so. Indeed, many of my students are now responding so casually to school shootings. I don’t see the fear or the hysteria when we have the lock down drills anymore — complacency? Inevitability? One boy wrote a short story on school shootings. Everyone died in the end. I asked him if he was taking the “easy” way out of the story, cliche ending maybe rather than finding a solution. He said that to have people live is cliche, that he no one really expects to survive when there is a school shooting. I couldn’t believe we were having that conversation.
Sarah, the “if” is a powerful word, that initial step that can take us to change. I so hope this generation exercises their power to change what has brought our flags to a mournful state in this country. As I watch our flags step down the pole, I feel our democracy is failing our children. I so appreciate teachers who are sensitive to students, who pay attention to the view outside that window, and who give students ways to share their voices.