Reflections on the Last Few Days

I. I admit it. I'm the weird one. Long before Parkland, long before Sandy Hook, long ago I began the practice of keeping my classroom door locked and closed at all times. What makes me weird is that I do not allow anyone except me to open the door.

You read that correctly. I answer the door, not students, not teenagers, not children. ME. Only me.

Teens see a classmate or friend through the window and throw the door open not stopping to realize that someone they cannot see may be ready to come through the door.

Only me.

It's routine for me. I hear a knock or a student alerts me that there's someone at the door. I go to the door, scan as much of the hallway as I can, assess the situation, and make the decision. If I make the wrong decision, I'm the one in the doorway dealing with it while my students jump out the window as fast as they can.

Weird ol' Mr. Sampson. It's the best I can do to keep my room secure.

II. Calls and plans for school walkouts have begun. Three days are mentioned: March 14, April 20 (anniversary of Columbine), and May 1. I have made no decision as to what I will do. I could be fired if I walk. At 60 years of age, it will be difficult to find another job and 60 is too early to retire. But a moment has arrived where one must make a decision whether to stand up and be counted.

Enough about me. This is a call for civil disobedience and that is what I will help students understand. There are times when rules and laws must be disobeyed, either because the laws and rules themselves are immoral or because something of tremendous importance requires action that would normally not be considered.

Students taking action, demanding change, demanding reasonable laws, insisting that their lives be protected, organizing protests in whatever form, walk-out, sit-in, or a march, these students are making the decision to engage in civil disobedience for a cause that matters: their lives.

There will be consequences and they need to understand that. That's the point of civil disobedience: authorities impose consequences until they are so shamed by the lack of resistance that they cannot ignore the issue anymore.

Remember these days: March 14, April 20, May 1.

III. You cannot enter the U.S. Capitol Building without undergoing a screening of your belongings and passing through a metal detector. Congress Protects Itself

Yet those senators and representatives won't even try to engage in writing laws to protect schoolchildren.

IV. Out of thousands of responses I've read over the past two days, I've only found two teachers saying, "Hell, yes , let me have a gun."

I'd like to say no teacher is saying that, but I have to be factual.

That almost no teacher wants a deadly weapon in their classroom should give all the self-appointed experts, who think because they once went to school they know everything about education, pause.

V. We can stop these tragedies. But it takes the will to do so. It takes the ability to find solutions and do it! It takes giving up all the divisions that our elite have devised to keep us apart and fighting when we the people should come together, give the elite the boot, and "form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." (Preamble to the United States Constitution, 1788)