On Thursday afternoon one of my students was arrested by police and taken from the school in handcuffs. Details are sparse, but it appears he made a threat to his previous school, the school that expelled him for bringing a knife to class. This is a troubling thing, particularly troubling because we knew that this was likely to happen. We knew he presented a danger. We knew he was mentally unwell. We rang the alarm bell and nothing happened to prevent it anyway. Because we live in Canada, it is more difficult - but not impossible - for a teenager to get ahold of a gun, and I have no doubt that if he could have found one, he would have used it. In our debrief of this incident, I wonder if this will come up as part of the conversation, the fact that we knew this was coming, and were powerless to stop it anyway.
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My family has left me alone for the weekend, and I am enjoying the quiet. Although I no longer enjoy extended periods of aloneness the way I used to, I do enjoy a few days to myself with no one to comment upon my quirky eating habits or to suggest I put on clothes instead of spending the whole day in pyjamas.
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Tomorrow I am volunteering to serve breakfast at a local shelter. I have to be there at 7am, which is not particularly early for me, but will be painful for the students who are coming with me as they are accustomed to an 8:30 start. I appreciate their spirit of outreach, a spirit that I do not recall possessing at seventeen, at least not in a way I could turn into action. My seventeen-year old outreach involved making what I thought was meaningful graffiti, and protesting animal cruelty by (timidly and halfheartedly) mumbling comments at people wearing fur.
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