Blog Archives

Pick a Season, Any Season - by KT Chen

5/28/2018

When I arrived, Chicago is in the throes record breaking heat, complete with heat advisories. (I admit, I scoffed. I had moved from Houston. The heat in Chicago had nothing on that).

Then came one of the coldest winters in its recorded history.

In March, it would fake spring by getting up into the high 50s / low 60s, before snowing the next day. I stopped getting excited that maybe spring was coming after the first three bait and switches. The start of April, according to the news, was the coldest in 147 years.

Last week, I left Chicago for a short family visit in the South. The South is already having summer, by the way. When I left Chicago, it was 55 degrees. When I returned, it was 88. Apparently, there is no spring this year. We went from winter straight into summer. That, or spring happened the four days I was gone. Either way, I feel gypped.

My allergies feel it too. They can’t decide what to do with themselves. Unfortunately, that means I’m miserable until they can get it together.

On the plus side, I outlined a potential story on my plane trip. I admit, it was inspired by my seatmate, but I’ll take inspiration wherever I find it. And maybe, just maybe, this will be the season in which I finish another story. Hopefully my writing will be a little more predictable than the weather in Chicago.

Go forth and write!

0 Comments

Enough - by KT Chen

5/20/2018

0 Comments

I did my semester of practice teaching the fall semester after Columbine.

That’s the school shooting benchmark, for those that don’t know. Those who were in education before, and those who came after. Because after is when policy and procedure changed for educators.

Yes, there were shootings (and bombings) of schools before Columbine. The year before, two kids pulled a fire alarm and shot at their classmates in the school-yard near Jonesboro, Arkansas. My grandmother lived in Bono (just down the road) and knew two of the kids who were killed. When I was at her house for Christmas that year, we talked about it. She was worried for me, as I was going to be a teacher in a country where teachers and students are targets.

Still, with Columbine, something changed.

Maybe it was the sensationalist feel of Columbine. Two boys in trench coats systematically gunning down their classmates. Maybe it was the videos. The two perpetrators had made several, prior to their massacre. Maybe it was just the scope of their plan – their raw desire inflict as much death and destruction as possible. And, had the bombs they made gone off, the carnage would have been much worse.

I honestly don’t know why Columbine became the catalyst and the measure, but it did. As educators, after Columbine, we implemented lock down procedures and intruder alerts. The administrators had code phrases to say over the intercom and teachers had survival buckets in our classrooms. We added lock down drills to the rotation of fire drills and inclement weather drills, because practice makes perfect.

And, after Columbine, there were other shootings. Every time people would get wound up and say we needed to change things, to fix things. Likewise, every time, the outrage would die down and people would go on with their lives. The communities impacted by the violence would never forget their losses, but they were vastly outnumbered by other sensationalist stories that would grab headlines and media feeds.

When I had a student in my own classroom pull a gun, my first thought, weirdly enough, was to Columbine. In that moment, I knew what every teacher and student that had ever faced a gun in their school felt. The raw fear. The aching sense of things unfinished. The worry for the students in my charge, even the one holding the gun.

I was very lucky. No one was hurt. The student was arrested and spent the remainder of their childhood in juvie.

At the start of the next school year, I called out a student in possession of a lighter during my lunch duty. When they wouldn’t hand it over to me, security and I and took the student to the school’s police officer. For the second time in less than one calendar year, I had a student pull a gun on me.

There were four of us in the very tight, cramped quarters of the office. The police officer talked the student down, secured the gun, and made the arrest. The student ended up in prison.

I ended up in martial arts. Specifically, I wanted to learn how to disarm an armed attacker. I’m sad to say that I now have that knowledge. I am sadder to say that I have had to use it, twice disarming students wielding knives and once to break up a fist fight. The irony of that is that I became the teacher respected by gangs and was given no further trouble. It is part of why I eventually left teaching. Violence shouldn’t earn respect.

A few years later, Sandy Hook happened.

In some ways, Sandy Hook was worse – not because Columbine wasn’t awful enough, but because the students were so much younger. Elementary, instead of high school.

At the time, I really believed that Sandy Hook would be the event that caused serious gun reform. After all, who could possibly justify *not* passing stricter gun laws after the murder of first graders?

It didn’t happen though.

And more and more shootings are happening. Parkland being a recent focal point; Santa Fe, Texas happened two days ago.

I am a supporter of the Second Amendment. I grew up in a family that had guns. I have taken hunter’s education classes. I married into a family that regularly hunted with rifles and bows. Though I don’t personally own any guns, I have more than a few weapons in the form of sharp, pointy things (knives and swords).

Even as a supporter of the Second Amendment I can say: the gun laws we have aren’t working. How do I know that? Because school shootings are still happening.

Do I have any neat and tidy ideas? No. But other countries have successfully managed to not have mass shootings, so I would suggest we start there. All good teachers know the way to success is to steal the best ideas from other teachers and put them into your classroom. Apply that to gun laws and regulations – steal the best ideas from other countries and implement them for our nation.

And the pro-Second Amendment people should do that, before the anti-Second Amendment people outnumber and out vote them. Because enough is enough.

Note: I do not usually blog about political topics, but gun violence hits close to home for me. Every time I see another school shooting in the news, I’m brought back to that day in my classroom where my student pulled the gun on me. I can still see their face. I can still remember the fear, the unfinished, and the worry. I can support guns and gun reform both, and I do.

In Memory of Those Killed or Wounded in Mass Shootings at Schools:

5/21/98 Westside Middle School, Arkansas - 5 killed, 10 wounded
5/21/98 Thurston High School, Oregon - 4 killed, 23 wounded
4/20/99 Columbine High School, Colorado - 15 killed, 21 wounded
4/21/05 Red Lake High School, Minnesota - 10 killed, 7 wounded
10/2/06 West Nickle Mines School, Pennsylvania - 6 killed, 3 wounded
4/16/07 Virginia Tech, Virginia - 33 killed, 23 wounded
2/14/08 Northern Illinois University, Illinois - 6 killed, 21 wounded
4/2/12 Oikos University, California - 7 killed, 3 wounded
12/14/12 Sandy Hook Elementary School, Connecticut - 28 killed, 2 wounded
10/1/15 Umpqua Community College, Oregon - 10 killed, 9 wounded
2/14/18 Stoneman Douglas High School, Florida - 17 killed, 17 wounded
5/18/18 Santa Fe High School, Texas - 10 killed, 13 wounded

0 Comments

The Cursor That Mocks Me - by KT Chen

5/14/2018

0 Comments

I haven’t written much at all lately.

There, I said it. I admit it.

I feel like I’m at an AA meeting: Hi, my name is Kris, and I haven’t written anything in almost two weeks. I’m a failure as a writer.

I know what stops me. I’ve been bouncing between three projects. All of them are interesting. The problem? The one I *really* want to write is the one I’m most scared *to* write.

The subject matter is personal. Inside my own skin, personal. The story isn’t finished, because I’m playing out parts of it in my real life. The outcome is uncertain, because, well, *I’m* still waiting to see what will happen. That scares the hell out of me, by the way. The unknown. The unknowable.

Every time I sit down and write some of it, and by “some” I mean a paragraph, two at most, I end up stopping and staring at the cursor. It unendingly blinks and mocks me. I may have this story, and it’s a whopper, but I can’t seem to make myself write it. Most frustratingly, it doesn’t matter that the majority of it is fiction; it’s the small slivers of not fiction that grind my key tapping to a halt.

And that’s when I find myself starting at the cursor. The cursor that mocks me.

0 Comments

Beauty and the Beast - A Tribute to the Big Island of Hawaii by KT Chen

5/7/2018

1 Comment

I had the opportunity, after college, to move to Hawaii and teach there. Never having been to the islands, I sold everything I could, drove my car to LA, put it on a boat and myself on a plane and took off for Hilo, the second biggest city in Hawaii. I had the sum total of one suitcase, a backpack, and a guitar when I arrived on the Big Island. My car would get there about six weeks after I did.

I knew when I landed that I was home.

I lived and worked on the east side of the Big Island. I affectionately called it the wet, sloppy side. It was jungle-esque with lots of rain and wind. The west side was the dry side with lava fields and sun scorched beaches. It was perfect. All of it.

Earthquakes were a common part of island life. Most were barely noticeable. A few were big enough to cause rock slides (an inconvenience) or power outages (a bigger inconvenience). A couple caused serious damage and shut down schools or bridges while experts could assess structural damage.

I spent a lot of time outside, exploring the island. I made several trips to the volcano, which had been active for some thirty-five years, belching volcanic ash into the air (called vog). After a hard rain, the wind would blow the vog out to sea and I could see Maui from my classroom. I was told that before Kilauea became active, you could see Maui every day.

One of the first things I learned when I got to the island was that it was divided up into sections, numbered 1 through 9. The lower the number, the more likely to be in the path of destruction, should the volcano erupt. The higher the number, the less likely. I lived and worked in an area that was numbered 8 on the scale. I regularly went to Hilo (a 3) and Kona (a 4).

What is happening now is lava melted the earth in certain places (causing vents to release the heat). In some places, lava has exploded out of the vents, in others, lava has slowly pushed up through the vents. In both cases, lava is actively moving from land to sea (because gravity is causing the flow from higher elevations to lower elevations … even if it never actually gets to the sea, it is flowing downhill in the path of least resistance).

I am very sorry for the loss of property for those in the path of the lava flow. For those who would ask: why do people live in such a dangerous area? The answer is because it’s the only place they could afford. Living in paradise is expensive.

I hope the first-responders are safe. I hope my Ohana are all safe as well. Both are very on my mind as I have watched the events unfold over the past few days.

Beautiful and deadly. That's my island.

And whoever pissed off Pele? Please make amends before she does even more damage.

1 Comment

Pick a Season, Any Season - by KT Chen

Enough - by KT Chen

The Cursor That Mocks Me - by KT Chen

Beauty and the Beast - A Tribute to the Big Island of Hawaii by KT Chen

Author

Archives