Adam Patric Miller: The New Normal

I see an administrator running in the library. I turn to my colleagues. We are working in our PLC (professional learning community) but really my colleague just showed me a video of her baby son enjoying swinging on a swing set and blowing a kiss to mom. Of course, I shared back with a video of my grown son singing in his rock band plus a picture of me cradling his head in our backyard in Ohio in the spring of 2000—he was born two months after Columbine.

“I just saw an administrator running out of the library,” I say. We are in an enclosed room in the library that is soundproof and it’s a professional development day so no students in the building. It’s quiet and peaceful.

“There’s a bomb threat,” a voice says. “Get out of the building now.” We do.

Welcome to the new normal. A week prior a threat was posted on social media: a picture of an AR-15 with dates and schools superimposed. Our school is scheduled for September 24, but we have emails from administrators claiming the threat is no longer credible. As a teacher, we know CO will not share any specific details. Legally, they can’t, they say. But this morning’s threat is ahead of the “no longer credible threat” we carry in the back of our minds.

I thought about calling in sick today. I have loads of personal statements for college to read, prep for Monday, hours of required videos to watch about safety issues, health issues, dyslexia, air-born pathogens, Title IX and so on, due October 1, 2024.

Now I’m at our dining room table—thanks to one of our grown kids being home who snatched me from a sidewalk—but still feeling the adrenaline and turning to writing. My keys are back at school and dogs from the St. Louis Airport will arrive to take hours sniffing each classroom. As I was fast-walking to the nearest exit, I thought about making a detour to get my keys so I could get home, but I thought: If I get blown up grabbing my keys my wife will be so pissed at me. “What did he do?” she’ll ask incredulously. Instead, I’m fine with her text about how I’m always supposed to have my keys with me. When was the last time anyone actually blew up a bomb in an American school? This morning before school I was thinking about the explosions in Lebanon and my new student who wrote about dancing an Arabic dance during a Maronite retreat—she was sick yesterday. Does she have relatives in Lebanon? Are they okay? Is she okay? It’s too early in the school year for me to know her well enough to ask.

I’m sweating. I wore a pink t-shirt to school today with jeans hoping I could wear it tonight to hear a poetry reading. For some reason, the poet part of my brain has been triggered. It happened after seeing a video on Instagram and involved a dead baby being pulled from wreckage. I want to start a club at school called The Poetic Justice Club or the Social Poet’s Club. I’ve talked to students about it. They are excited to read poetry from other countries, poets who know that, as Audre Lorde wrote, “Poetry is not a Luxury.” That will be our slogan. Anyway, in the poem I wrote, I quoted from Tawfiq Zayyad’s poem “Here We Shall Stay” the lines, “we shall remain/like a wall upon your chest.” I feel buried by his poem but also inspired by it. I must act. I want students to feel that, too. That will be a great club if I can get it going.

To do that the teachers who are experiencing the new normal must go back into school each day, despite mounting evidence that maybe our skills, energy, talents and life force should do good anywhere else. That was kind of what I was saying to my colleague as we walked to a rally point. She’s so young and can do something else to help young people so she can take care of her baby son. That’s all I wanted to do as a Dad. But what I see in her is what I see in myself and it’s what I see in my colleagues despite differing pedagogical and political beliefs. The pressure is on us to keep going in, to remain teachers who believe that the answer to the threats, the bullets, the bombs, the bombast of our politicians, is contained in the act of educating young people to think for themselves and to see the fragile humanity of people beyond the walls some would build or smash down upon the innocent—including ourselves.

Adam Patric Miller has taught high school for 25 years in three states and currently teaches in St. Louis. He is the author of the book A Greater Monster, a collection of essays selected by Phillip Lopate to win the Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize.

Copyright 2024 Adam Patric Miller