As any deed of a sick person this accident is not explainable, so with my 13 year old I just stated the facts and mentioned that unfortunately it could happen in any school; with my 4 years old I didn't touch the subject directly, but I mentioned that if some unknown person wants to scare her while at daycare she can hide in a school locker. No parent can type this without crying on the helpless situation of the past shooting. And asking how we explain to kids does not help anybody because the next time when a mass shooting happens it will be under different circumstance. It is right to pay attention to how the weapons are handled by the people possessing them, because it is a big responsibility to care for a weapon and it should be acknowledged.

I'm a high school social studies teacher, so my first instinct was to engage my students in discussion around a current events lesson. We read a Times piece about an elementary school shooting in California in 1979, then made connections between that shooting and Friday's event.

I quickly discovered that my lesson was misplaced. My students, many of whom have younger brothers or sisters (and all of whom are very empathetic by nature), seemed to feel a strong personnel connection to what happened on Friday. Many of them spoke of concerns for younger school children the same age as the younger members of their family.

As odd as it may sound, I sensed that their concerns over the shooting were stronger -much stronger, in fact- than their concerns over the storm that effected us all seven weeks ago. Of course, it had been a full week after the storm before teachers met with their students -more than enough time for the initial shock to subside (the feelings from Friday's shootings are still very much new for all of us -students as well), so maybe that accounts for it.

As a teacher, I'm (very much) looking forward to getting some perspective on the event and doing another current events lesson sometime after the new year.