CHAPEL HILL (August 31, 2023) – If the killing of a professor by one of his students Monday at UNC-Chapel Hill tells us nothing else, it tells us how treacherous teaching has become in this country.
We still don’t know the shooter’s motives. We still don’t fully know whether the shooter intended to kill more people, though early indications are that it was a shooting targeted at an individual. We still don’t know what weapon he used or how he got it.
But our hearts go out to the family – particularly the two young children – of Dr. Zijie Yan.
Yan was the Associate Professor of Applied Physical Sciences who was killed in the shooting1 that locked down campus at UNC-Chapel Hill and Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools for three hours Monday.2
The events were traumatic for thousands of bewildered students, faculty and staff who huddled for hours in locked classrooms, dorm rooms, closets and basements.
The front page of The Daily Tar Heel told the story Wednesday, using nothing but dozens of the texts sent by frantic students.3
MAKE NO MISTAKE, teaching has become an ever-more stressful profession in K-12 schools, higher education and even pre-schools.4
We simply don’t show teachers the respect they deserve – even though teaching is the profession that creates all others.
It starts with low pay, particularly for K-12 and community-college instructors.
In recent years, politicians have also politicized the classroom over the ways race and gender issues are addressed.
They’ve underfunded public schools, then criticized them for their performance. And defying the rule of law, they’ve bluntly refused in North Carolina to abide by repeated court orders to adequately fund our public schools.5
At the same time, they move to step up state subsidies – vouchers – for private schools with little or no accountability.6
It’s no wonder our public universities have seen a 43% decline in education majors since 2010.7
Not many years ago, a poor report card could mean a scolding (or worse) for a student. These days, it seems, the parent of a poorly performing student or the student himself is as likely to confront the teacher.
How many of us grew up practicing active-shooter drills in school? Sadly, such drills have become somewhat commonplace these days.
“We are the Sandy Hook generation,” wrote Georgia Roda-Moorhead, a young columnist for The Daily Tar Heel who started writing her piece during lockdown in the darkened basement of Granville Towers West.8
The low pay for teachers might just as well be called hazardous-duty pay – except that hazardous-duty pay is generally extra.
So as you try to make sense of the senseless in Chapel Hill this week, please hug a teacher. Tell them you love them. And tell them you appreciate what they do.
1 https://www.wral.com/story/unc-shooting-victim-faculty-academic-adviser/21023373/; https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article278727509.html.
2 https://www.wral.com/story/live-updates-unc-faculty-member-dead-in-on-campus-shooting/21021949/.
3 https://s3.amazonaws.com/snwceomedia/dth/a05ac798-5a0a-468c-b74d-4db0a2a8b559.original.pdf; https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article278721339.html; https://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2023/08/opinion-grief-letter-youre-not-alone.
4 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/school-shooting-tennessee-leaves-multiple-injured-shooter-dead-officia-rcna76841.
5 https://hew.aveltsagency.com/2021/11/leandro-a-quarter-century-of-bickering/; https://www.wral.com/story/judge-nc-s-unfunded-education-mandates-total-677-8m/20819047/.
6 https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article277886823.html; https://hew.aveltsagency.com/2023/05/vouchers-the-privatization-of-nc-public-schools/.
7 https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article264526776.html.
8 https://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2023/08/opinion-grief-letter-youre-not-alone.
Elle says
How about instead of “hug a teacher” it is write your legislator about teacher pay.
Michael Childs says
To the editor:
“If the killing of a professor by one of his students Monday at [Carolina} tells us nothing else, it tells us how treacherous teaching has become in this country.”
If the campus shooting teaches us nothing else, it teaches us nothing at all. This agenda-driven lead-in is nonsense. I guarantee you that investigation of this tragic crime will show no connection whatsoever between criticism of North Carolina public schools’ scandalously low test scores, or legislative efforts to “politicize” the schools by protecting innocent children from the efforts to normalize sex changes, and the irreversible mutilation of children that often goes with it, before the children are developed, wise or learned enough to make reasoned judgments about the consequences, or legislative efforts to suppress teaching to young people about race relations based on untested and unproven “theories” that engender hatred of white people by other races or self-loathing by whites.
I tend to agree that we need to pay teachers more, and to appreciate and thank our teachers, but critics of our schools’ abysmal results have right to be very concerned.
It is possible, too, that the General Assembly has gone too far in ladling out money for PRIVATE school education, but what do test scores teach us about our PUBLIC schools’ success at teaching?
Every few years Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools roll out, at great expense, the latest in schemes to narrow the racial gap in test scores and raise scores in general, but they never work. Trying something different, as the General Assembly is doing, is logical.
Deep down, Higher Education Works has one over-arching agenda: to rid higher (and lower) education of any influence by the Other – duly-elected GOP members of the General Assembly (or “the legislature” as some of our dumb-down papers call it) or their duly-chosen appointees. This article’s pitiful effort to tie conservatives’ criticism of public schools’ poor results and attempts to curb divisive and harmful teaching in our schools to the shooting on our flagship university’s campus by a graduate student of his mentor (both, apparently, native Chinese) is, in the word above, nonsense – juvenile, agenda-driven nonsense.
Yours truly,
Michael Childs
Charlotte