Rick's List

The quickest way to raise an American's blood pressure these days is to weigh in on the gun debate. As such, I'll keep any pro/con stuff to myself. However, regarding the idea of "arming teachers" to prevent school shootings, I do have one alternative concept:

Instead of sending them to prison, give armed violent criminals the option to teach school instead! Their presence would assuredly thwart attacks, right? As for the educational logistics, maybe it's easier for a vicious career psychopath to master and teach Intro to Geometry or Post-Civil War American Lit than it would be to transform the Bennie Dover or NFA librarian into Chris Kyle.

Just thought I'd run that by you.

As I think back on my own elementary school teachers, I wonder if any would have been been solid candidates for such a strategy. I know what you're thinking: Can Koster even REMEMBER his elementary school teachers? Actually, yes.

And forget suggesting that my childhood was a particularly "idyllic time." I was in the third grade and 8.3 miles away when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and in the sixth grade and 200 miles away when Charles Whitman shot 46 people from the University of Texas tower. The beginning, maybe, of the end of innocence.

Here are my teachers in order, along with my evaluation on whether they'd have been any good in a school yard firefight.

1

Mrs. Lancaster, first-grade homeroom — What a sweet woman! She was also ancient (and not just from my perspective as a 6-year-old). I remember she'd fought on the side of the Shawnee during Tecumseh's War, and would tell us jolly stories and lead us in self-composed singalongs about the bloody raids she'd orchestrated in that conflict.

2

Mrs. Williams, second-grade homeroom — Auburn hair, butterfly glasses, slight overbite. I still have a faded and slightly blurry photo of that year's Christmas Pageant, and in it she has a large Bowie Knife strapped to her waist.

3

Mrs. Turner, third- and fourth-grade homeroom — Apple cheeks, booming laugh, and black hair in a Marge Simpson tower. She was a bit plump and always smelled of gardenias. After school, when the other teachers would smoke and chat in the faculty parking lot, Mrs. Turner would repair to the back of the school property and blast a sawed-off shotgun at paper likenesses of Nazi war criminals.

4

Mrs. Stanton, fifth- and sixth-grade homeroom — Softly pretty in a "Donna Reed Show" mom sorta way, she also spoke with what I now know was a Georgia accent. I can't imagine her shooting a firearm for any reason. We did find it odd that, while our fellow pupils in the other sixth-grade classes studied standard English and social studies textbooks, Mrs. Stanton assigned us a graphic tome called "Forensic Pathology For Kiddos."