Go Ask A.L.I.C.E.

The other day at school we did A.L.I.C.E. training. If you don't know what that stands for, you're either not a teacher, or you live in a civilized country. ALICE stands for:

• Alert 
• Lockdown
• Inform 
• Counter
• Evacuation

These are the steps you are instructed to go through if your school has an active shooter inside. The presentation was handled by a very nice county police officer, who did very well at his horrible job. His job is to train teachers what to do in the event one of their students decides to kill his (or her, I guess, but it's so much more likely to be his) classmates. 

It's a frustrating day, not the least because it forces you to consider which of your students might be potential shooters, and if you've mistaken the quiet bookish kid for a depressed killer. It's frustrating to think of how our time might be spent not learning how to evade gunfire but how to more effectively engage students in critical thinking, or analyze the role of technology in their lives. Instead, we learn the best ways to evacuate a building in case of an active shooter; how to barricade the classroom door so a shooter can't easily enter; what objects in the classroom may be thrown at a shooter, and how to disrupt the aim of a student leveling his legally-purchased assault rifle at you. Every moment spent preparing for violence is a moment of learning lost.

It's frustrating because no other country in the developed world requires this. No other country allows its children to be gunned down in the name of freedom, a freedom fought for by the companies who sell it. Other industrialized countries fear guns as tools for violence; America fetishizes them. Nothing makes me want to emigrate more than the thought of the 14,000+ deaths by gun every year. I hate that it's hard to feel safe in my own country, when Japanese society went ballistic when total annual gun deaths reached 22.

I don't have a solution to a country in which there is statistically one gun for every person. I don't believe guns are necessary to protect freedom (Tunisia had the lowest gun ownership rate in the world and successfully ousted their actual dictator in 2011.) I don't believe that your right to have a hobby should be more important than the right of kindergarteners to be alive. I don't believe that violence would disappear without guns, but I do believe that I'd rather have a guy running at me with a knife than a gun.

For now, I guess I'll just take a class on how to throw textbooks at one of my students if he turns violent. 

Down with the Sickness

We blew past the six-month half-birthday celebration with nary a mention, mostly due to the chaos that being six months old seems to bring. Raptor-Son is sitting up on his own now, and can roll backward and forward. He has just started to eat solid foods, and once fell asleep on his own. With all of these new abilities has come the loss of sleeping through the night, but given that he's so much more alert and attentive now, it's an okay trade off.

With the change of seasons has come our first illness though. I think we did pretty good, he's been in daycare for six weeks without a problem. I attribute this to the fact that he's around two teachers all day long, and both of us probably carry every antibody known at this point. However, the Daycare Bug got him at some point in late September, and he woke up covered in his own mucus, which is a big change from his normal procedure of waking up covered in his own saliva. He also got a nasty cough which I thought might be croup. It sounded awful, although it never seemed to bother him.

He picked up the cough on a Saturday, and was scheduled to go in for his normal check up on Monday anyway, so we waited it out. By Monday, it was already better, but I was glad we were taking him in. A pediatrician I didn't know checked him out, pronounced him Awesome, and let us know he had a minor ear infection. I'm mostly curious how people are supposed to know their babies have ear infections; Raptor-Son never did any of the outward signs, like messing with his ear or being fussy in general. He never raised a temperature above 99.4, and appeared pretty much healthy. At any rate, she prescribed a jar of Amoxicillin and off we went.

The process of giving him that was terrible too, but has gotten much better. He mostly dribbles it out of his mouth, so I think when they prescribe 5 ml, they are planning on 4 of it running down his chin. He's much better now; that was 8 days ago. Now he likes to sit in his playpen, mess with his toys while sitting up, and chew on his fingers to help the tiny tooth coming in on his lower gums. It's a full day.