What I Teach 3rd Graders

I teach how to shake hands
and raise hands
and clap hands
to appreciate.
How to listen
how to wait
how to hold a pencil
(not a gun).

I teach that every sentence
has a subject
(The man)
and a predicate
(is shooting children)
and some have a prepositional phrase
(in their classroom.)
I teach them to pause
at a comma, to stop
at a period
and a ? means you are asking
(Why? Why? Why?)

I teach them to multiply
legs on dogs
fingers on hands
(not shootings in schools),
and how in subtraction you start
with the bigger number
and when you’re done taking away
you have less.
(17 less in Parkland, 15 less in Columbine, 27 less in Sandy Hook.)

I teach about places
(unmarred
by children murdered at school),
the lives of people
who have made a difference
(not a massacre),
how water can be absorbed
or repelled
(like blood on linoleum)
and that some words, like repel,
mean more than one thing.

I teach them to walk quietly
in a line when the fire alarm sounds,
to duck and cover
until the earth stops shaking,
and to lay on the floor
(like fish in a barrel)
if a bad man comes.

What I don’t tell them
is in that hellish haze
of gunfire and screams
I plan to toss them like ragdolls
behind bookshelves,
stack them like cordwood
behind cubbies,
that my only calculation
will be how many can I save,
how many will I leave to die?

So when I rescue
a spider from the sink
scoop it into a paper cup
set it down among green leaves,
they breathe as one, relieved,
because I’ve taught them
it’s wrong to kill
small creatures.

- Lisa Shulman