Ah, the teacher, the unlikely companion in the race to save us from ourselves. We ask a lot of our teachers. They help raise our children, they provide mentorship, they buy supplies, they serve as a therapeutic ear to their students needs. Sometimes, they do this without heat in the classrooms, or without safe drinking water from the fountains.  Indeed, we ask a lot of our teachers, but now they are asking something from us: to LISTEN!

Teachers went on strike in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and most recently Arizona. Further strikes are to occur in Colorado. They are doing so after years of stagnate wages and lack of proper upward adjustments in education funding. And no, not all school districts are created equal. The strikes come from the bottom percentiles in terms of losing out on education funds since 2008:

                                                             Read this Article from Vox to find out more!

From my experience as both a student and a teacher, I can tell you how important proper funding is. As a student in Northern Virginia, I went to a top notch high school with plenty of diversity, arts, sports, and academics. Our buildings were under constant construction while I attended, but they turned the school into a remarkable campus with all the amenities.

As a teacher in Baltimore City, however, I experienced a shortage of chairs, which led to students sitting on the radiator, which broke the radiator so everyone had to wear coats in the classroom during the cold days. The Math Cart, which we had to use to give state sanctioned tests, would have to be manually hauled up and down the stairs when the elevator wasn't working due to frequent electric outages and sometimes small fires. The water fountains could not be used for fear of lead poisoning. The bathrooms had stalls without doors.

It is amazing the difference in the quality of learning when schools have the resources they need to conduct business. Most people agree, according to a poll on the recent teacher strikes:

                                                       Read another article from Vox on the public opinion poll!

People are listening, are politicians?

I feel like I never graduated. April 16, 2007 changed the lives of many at Virginia Tech after a troubled student took the lives of 32 of his classmates and teachers. I was taking a Geology test at the time. I remember having a bad case of Senioritis. So bad that the night before the shooting, having skipped Geology for almost two weeks straight, I saw the syllabus reminding me of my test and thought with passion, "I would do anything for this semester to be over..." My passionate thought was answered in the cruelest of ways, a seldom confessed fact that has burned regret in my brain.

After the test was completed, I remember going to the library to study for a Quantum Mechanics exam that I had coming up. As I entered the elevator, I saw a sign next to the doors that read something like..."there has been a shooting on campus, two people are in the hospital and a suspect is in custody." A man taking the elevator with me commented, "If they just allowed guns on campus, this would never happen." I remember thinking that he was right, but that the same was true if no one had a gun, those two arguments clearly cancel each other out. This began my exploration into the Public Health and Prevention Science world of research, which is why I work for Reaching Out to Other Together (ROOT) and The Least Recognized Gun Violence Expert in the United States of America, Kenny Barnes Sr. 

​After sometime in the library, my phone began to receive texts like wild fire. "Are you ok?" people asked me. "Of course," I replied. Didn't they know that it was a contained incident? Then there was an announcement that the library was shutting down and that we were not allowed to leave, there was an active shooter on campus. Several of the other students had laptops and began to watch the news feed. "9 dead at Virginia Tech," the reports said. "16 dead in a massive school shooting," came a little bit later. The number grew and grew. By the time they let us out, some two hours later, the number reached 28. By the time I walked home, it was 32. With the death of the shooter, the total death count became 33, with an additional 23 who were injured. 

In the aftermath, we were told that our grades would not go below what they were at the time of the shooting. Counselors reached out to us to offer us free therapy. I graduated, but I feel like I didn't.