Today, Robert Reich’s daily post was “A Teacher Speaks.” He re-posted Kathleen West’s “I’m Having Some Thoughts About Teaching.”

As you must know by now, I myself am always having some thought about teaching. Teachers who bother to write about teaching echo each other. I’m no different.

West’s column (a word use, I guess, that comes from when newspapers – remember those? – would print articles in columns across the page) centers on school shooting practice drills, and how teachers are instructed to prepare for such events and threats and dangers. She’d give up her life to protect the children. And some people think teaching is just a job.

What else is new? I remember, seventy years ago and more, when it was “Duck and Cover.” At a signal or a siren, we’d all drop down and crawl under our desks as far as we could, students and teachers too, after the teacher went down the aisles to check that we were doing it right, under as far as we could go, that we had our heads down, our hands clasped over them to protect our precious brains, and then the teacher would go back to the front of the class and crawl under their own big teacher desk.

Those were the days when the threat was the atomic bomb and air raids. When I grew up and was teaching myself, we’d discuss the world situation, nuclear deterrence, government gone crazy mad, issuing proclamations about how to protect yourself from the bomb and radiation, go in your back yard, dig a trench six inches deep, lie down in it, and cover yourself with the dirt. The dirt would save us.

Even the students I taught could see right away that we were told to dig our own graves. And then just lie in them. Probably for hours. Or longer. As if six inches of dirt would protect us from the radiation which everyone knows can penetrate invisibly through yards of concrete. “Do they think we’re children?” “Are they saving money on funerals?”

Government was protecting us by teaching us how to die and resign ourselves to it.

I taught the drills, but not the resignation. But my classroom was too small to teach more than thirty at a time, and see where we are now!

There’s a lot more I can say about all this, and have (see my blog, see my book, For Lo These Many) and will, but for now I don’t want to obsess about the world gone mad. That can drive you mad.

Better to get mad and do something about it.

Or take a break, live a little. Know any jokes? How about the one where two scientists walk into a bar…or two politicians…or… Not that I recommend drinking, not to excess, not because alcohol, like other drugs, can take you out of this world and away from yourself and make you become what you’re not and less than you are, no, I don’t like worst case scenarios. Better to find ways to live life, find joy and love. step outside into the sun, while it’s still shining.

Not so long ago (I just can’t seem to let it go), more than twenty years, seems like yesterday, when I was still teaching high school English, banished to the bungalows, little contiguous structures like a row of tract house classrooms, the siren would go off over the city and we’d lock the doors against intrusion, shooters, hunker for hours, I’d try to teach any something. The school security guys who usually just patrol the playground to keep the kids in line, would bring us bottles of water. It gets hot in those bungalow classrooms without ground level windows and the famous California L. A. basin temperatures, and then, after, we were still locked in our little prison sanctuary, security would take us one by one, and escort us to the restroom and back, students first, teacher last, but after all that water they brought us we all had to go, and then, when it was my turn to be escorted to the faculty restroom, I was replaced for the interim by a teacher colleague on conference period available for that student-free hour when their job was now not grading papers or counseling students, but to briefly replace teachers all over the school, because “You must never leave the students unsupervised.”

And the students, who knew too much about such things, scared, “Is it real this time? Is there shooting? Are we safe?”

We’ve been doing this so long you’d think by now we’d put a stop to the conditions that necessitate such defensive actions, that we’d shape up the world.

You’d think.