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That Time My High School Teacher Was Shot in Class

It’s been ten months since I have written about gun violence in America.  Nothing has changed. There are still shootings, still deaths, still indignation about freedom and rights, still dithering, cowardly politicians.  The numbers are staggering.

STAGGERING, people.  265 mass shootings in 2015.  559 children under the age of eleven killed by guns in the past 279 days of 2015 — that is two children a day.  Over 10,000 deaths in 2015 alone.  More people have died from gun shot wounds in America since 1968 than in every American war casualty to date.  Truth.

Let those numbers just sink in and stagger you for a moment.

I am at a loss. I sit here, behind a keyboard, watching neighbors go about their day from my front window, listening to my toddler play in the background.  I should feel safe, and yet, I don’t. The NRA would have me go buy myself a pretty little pistol to increase my (false) sense of security.  They trade on our fear and are profiting quite nicely from it right now.

The situation feels surreal to me.  I can’t grasp or understand it anymore.  It was not like this when I was a child.  It was not like this when I was a teen.  A teacher was shot at my high school when I was a student there, and I did not feel this level of fear or concern.

When that shooting occurred in March, 1986 I was a junior at Thornridge High School in Chicago’s south suburbs.  A freshman, a boy I did not know, shot my former math teacher, Miss Norma Cooper.  I read the archived AP account of the event and my jaw drops.

After the shooting, Miss Cooper ”left the room, went across the hall to another room and called our youth officer, Jack Thomsen,” who works at the school, [Dolton Police Chief] Pfotenhauer said.

Meanwhile, a math teacher in an adjoining room, who heard the shot, rushed to Miss Cooper’s room and led the 22 other students into another room, said District 205 School Superintendent Jack Curless.

When Thomsen arrived, the boy ”had the gun in his hand at the back of the room,” Pfotenhauer said.

Thomsen then persuaded him to surrender.

The boy was taken into custody and charged, and was to be held in a youth home in Chicago, Pfotenhauer said.

”It was a little bit of a drama at first,” but teachers were able to calm the students and classes returned to normal shortly after the shooting, the police chief said.

“Classes returned to normal shortly after the shooting.” “It was a little bit of a drama at first.”

Miss Norma Cooper, c. 1985. She never returned to our school, no mention was ever made in the yearbook. A school shooting swept under the carpet.
Miss Norma Cooper, c. 1985. She never returned to our school, no mention was ever made in the yearbook. A school shooting swept under the carpet.

I know those sentences to be accurate because I was there.  Truth be told, I barely remember the incident.  As students we were encouraged not to speak to the press.  We were assured that our teacher survived and was safe, then, in all honesty, we just went on with our day.

In 1986, there was no protocol to address a school shooting.  There was no culture that normalized school shootings, indicating just how to respond.  There were no lock down drills. There were no statistics to update.  The shooter did not have a manifesto to ensure his notoriety.  He did not martyr himself or attempt to take out as many people as he could.

In 1986 you had a very, very disturbed kid mad about being suspended and taking his security officer father’s gun to school in his backpack to shoot a teacher.  He surrendered his gun and was tried as a juvenile.

Those were, apparently, the salad days of school shootings.

And that is the reality we exist in as Americans today.  I can now wax poetic and tell my children that when I was a kid I didn’t need to walk through a metal detector in my school lobby.  When I was a kid and a fellow student shot their teacher, the teacher lived and I went on to my next class.  When I was a kid we had tornado drills, not intruder drills.

It turns my stomach.

The shooting of my math teach, Miss Cooper, happened just a few months shy of thirty years ago now. America’s dangerous and growing obsession with guns has occurred during that time.  I don’t know exactly how or when, but the unholy obsession is now palpable.

People across the world mock us. The NRA ensures our politicians actively work to keep researchers from studying the impact of gun violence.  Twenty first graders are methodically gunned down in their classroom and we wring our hands, wondering if we should do something to address the matter.  We blame the mentally ill, the gangs, the Christian haters.

Fuck that noise.

We are sick, America, dying from indifference and pride and irrationality.  Guns are acting as a cancer that is not responding to the weak chemotherapy of public outcry that sprouts up with every new mass shooting.  We tell ourselves it is them, the black or the poor or the mentally ill or the criminal, that have the problem.  We cling to the idea of a constitutional right being more important than life and liberty. We argue that there is nothing to be done, no way to solve this dilemma.  Stuff happens, right?

We have lost our way and we are dying because of it.  Our consternation is pathetic.  I am ashamed of some of us.  I fear for all of us.

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An Apple, a Knife, and a Six Year Old

This morning I woke up to my son running into my bedroom with a bloody thumb, scared, but not crying, and holding a Darth Vader Band-Aid.  Something was wrong. He told me, with certainty, that he had banged his thumb on the wall.  He was fibbing.

It took a few moments to realize that he had cut his thumb while trying to slice an apple. I should have known immediately, but it was six a.m. and I had had a restless night.  I sliced an apple for myself as a snack before bed.  It was an enormous Honeycrisp that we had picked the previous weekend right off the tree at an orchard in Michigan.

Apples that size can feed a family of six, so I left the remaining half on the counter thinking we would eat it in the morning.  What I didn’t think was that the boy would wake up and get the idea to cut the apple himself.  He’s six.  Six year olds don’t use knives.  Or do they? I don’t know.

I’m doing this whole raise a six year old for the first time here.  Sometimes I think I limit him out of pure unknowingness.  Other times I know I limit him out of pure ‘I don’t have time to teach you, so I will do it myself so we can get goingness.’  Sigh.

Apple

He had cut his hand once before while using scissors at his grandparents as a youngster.  There was a lot more blood that time.  I remember being unnaturally calm in those moments, especially seeing my son’s hand and arm covered with his own bright red blood.

This morning, even in my fumbling first moments of wakefulness, that calmness returned.  It turned out the cut wasn’t so bad.  Like a longer, deeper version of a paper cut.  The kid was lucky.  He could have done a lot more damage to himself.

As we sat in the bathroom together, washing his hand and applying a bit of pressure before the Band-Aid, I realized my boy was growing up.  Six is an interesting mix of little and big.  He tests his limits all the time.  He asserts a growing need for independence.  He is doing exactly as he should.

It honestly never would have occurred to me to teach him to use a knife properly.  But he’s ready.  It’s time.  My boy is growing up.  He knew it before I did.

We ended up, my boy and I, having a lovely heart to heart in the bathroom.  I asked after why he felt the need to lie, telling me he had banged his thumb on the wall.  I acknowledged that I thought he was ready to start using a knife himself, albeit, with adult supervision.  We both agreed that as he got older he could take on more and more responsibilities.

And try as a might, I couldn’t stop myself from remarking that if he was old enough to learn how to use a knife, he was probably old enough to know to pick up his dirty laundry from the floor.  What?!  I saw an opportunity and jumped on it.

It is a beautiful thing to have a growing child, learning and pushing his limits.  I am new to all this, so will take it as it comes.  It seems we both have much to learn.

 

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Sheila’s Story: A Love Letter to My Daughter’s Oncologist

September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. Each day I will feature a different guest blogger who will generously share their personal experience with childhood cancer.  Stories are always more potent than statistics. 

By Sheila Quirke 

Dear Stew,

I am fairly certain that you will read these words and they will embarrass you.  That’s okay. You’ve experienced far worse than a grateful, broken mother expressing her heartfelt love and admiration towards you.

Of course you have.  Your day-to-day is the dying and saving of children with cancer.  I can’t begin to understand what that is like, the weight that you carry.

I imagine it, though.  Well, I try.  All the time.  I’ve imagined what it must be like to be you since even before I met you — sometime between hearing the words, “There is a mass in your daughter’s head,” and those days a few weeks later when we actually met you, The Great Dr. Stew.

Did you know you have a bit of a reputation?  It’s true.

People love you.  Universally.  You are beloved. You wear silly ties and sing show tunes down the hall and have opinions about baseball and cartoons.  I know that you prefer Arthur over Caillou and the White Sox over the Cubs.

Honestly, I don’t know too much more about you, other than you do what you do inordinately well and that folks think very highly of you because of that.  I guess the not knowing leaves a bit of a clean slate, a tabula rasa, if you will, for me to project things onto you.

Try as I might to describe the esteem, the feelings a cancer parent has for their child’s oncologist, I always come up short.  ‘Intimate relationship’ is my go-to descriptor, but that sounds so clinical or vaguely misleading, doesn’t it?    But it’s true.

You have witnessed my most joyful and my most wrenching moments I will likely ever have on this earth.  And this is part of your job, your gig, so you do this with other parents, too.  All the time.

People say that the happiest days they have had are the day they married or the day their children were born.  Those days don’t hold a candle to the days I would get a call from you telling me that Donna’s chemo treatment was working, that her scans were clean.

Elation.  Relief.  Joy.  So much better than the day she was born — because I knew then, with certainty, in those calls with you, that nothing could ever, ever be taken for granted in my parenting.  Nothing in this world is a given.

You have a kindness and a generosity of humanity that astounds me.  I worry after you more often than I should.  I wonder, “What will people do when Stew retires?” or, “Is he eating well enough?” Like a Jewish mother, as if you needed another one of those.

When Children’s Memorial Hospital was closing its doors, I came by for one last visit, to pay my respects to the physical space that held so much of my daughter’s story in its walls.  I was sad and a little angry, I think.  Another connection to my girl, my Donna, was going to be lost to me.

You told me, that day, that you would take Donna with you.  I smiled politely, nodding my head, thanking you for your kindness.  Inside, hidden, I hope, was my more cynical, visceral response.  A great big, “Pffft.”  Please, I thought.  Right, he’ll take Donna with him. Sure.  Yep.  Alrighty!

Yes, perhaps there was some bitterness there, too, on the cusp of the hospital closing.

Months later, when I finally got up the courage to visit the new hospital, I saw you, walking down different halls, but still singing show tunes and still wearing a silly tie. And there, in that new and fancy hospital, a place my daughter had never set foot in, was my girl.  With you.  Just as you had promised.

How had I ever doubted you?

I knew then, Stew, that it was love I felt for you.  You are like home to me, like my childhood church, like a favorite blanket, or the familiar taste of my mother’s spaghetti. You are home.  My home.  I know, on a screen, those words probably don’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense, but in my head, they do.

You know Donna, my girl, inside and out, literally and figuratively.  You carry her with you, just as you said you would.  When I see you and we exchange hugs, there is love there. Genuine love.  It feels mutual.  There was a time I would have doubted that.  I don’t, anymore.

Dr. Stew, wearing a silly tie. Of course.
Dr. Stew, wearing a silly tie. Of course.

So, yes, Stew.  I love you.  The love is selfish, as you are a human thread to the girl that is lost to me, but the other side of that love coin is just deep and unabashed respect and admiration for you.  What a magnificent human being you are to do what you do with such compassion and kindness and raw skill.

On behalf of every child you have treated, and every mother and every father, every brother and sister, every grandparent, aunt and uncle.  Thank you, Stew.  Words will never be enough, but perhaps the love will suffice.  You are simply extraordinary and we are so very grateful to you.

(Okay, on a scale of 1-10, how embarrassed are you?)

From a fan,

Sheila, Donna’s Mama

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Stewart Goldman, MD is the Division Head of Hematology/Oncology, Neuro-Oncology, and Stem Cell Transplantation at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.  You can read Dr. Stew’s Story HERE from the 2013 September Series, where he describes what it is like to be a pediatric neuro-oncologist.  If you wish to donate to his research, you can do that HERE, listing the “Neuro-Oncology Fund” in the comment section of the donation page.

Please know that Stew is one of many, too many to mention, that cared for my daughter during her treatment.  I could and should write love letters to all of them, from surgeons to nurses to custodians.  Each of them are loved and appreciated and, I suspect, will never fully know the role they play in the lives of the children they treat.

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