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The recent school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut is about mental illness run amok, about injustice perceived, and about hopelessness. It is about revenge.

It is a story all too familiar to island students. The story does not need much explanation to them, much figuring out. They want to know how I will protect them if someone wants to harm them, if I will fight like a bear for their lives.

It could also be about competition, about notoriety, and about power. Shootings happen all the time: homes, post offices, streets, shopping malls, cars, and yes, in schools. When they happen in a school, they point out all the more with what a person identifies. If it is a high school where they perceive they were tortured, no possible good can come of it.

If all one’s hopes and dreams are centered on a high school experience where one size is supposed to fit all, then how can we nurture a wide variety of individuals? We are bending over backwards to make them fit one size. Some will never fit. They have been taking notice, sometimes to the extreme.

Students and their teachers are thrown into bullying situations almost daily. Everyone knows that the bullies are the ones who were bullied. This is later. This happens after a while.

In reality, high school is not a happy place for many growing adolescents. If bullying does not let up, the bullied either self-destruct, harm others, or both.

There are never enough chances to promote peace, never enough time to go past differences and onto something else. Like art. Like music. Like theater. These are places that the bullied flock to. An amazing paradox is that these places have been cut, downsized. Digital technology, and all the mandates that support its frequent use, have been supersized, instead. “High test scores” has become the three-word mantra of all the adults in charge.

It is difficult to talk about peace in a world bent on destroying itself but it is also the perfect opportunity when the ideal American think-tank, the classroom, is under obvious attack through increased, implosive slaughter from the outside. Or, is it from the inside? When offenders are the students or former students themselves, one must really give pause not about a school’s test scores, but rather, about the tolerance and even promotion of bullying.

Questioning this issue maybe be the undoing of American education at its very core. Should all students be educated all together all of the time? Should there be separate tracks for students complete with separate schools, or at least separate job-training centers for at least part of the day? Obviously, the pressures of modern living are creating destructive monsters, and not soothing the souls of misfits who find themselves lost and excessively angry.

Violence says that obliteration rules the day, and young people see the means to power not as the power of the mind and learning, but a question of who can ultimately be in charge and “win” in a violent act.

Being angry and in pain is not fun. Teenagers are supposed to be having fun, learning everything they can to get into college, training programs, or start working and strive to join the middle class through hard work. They are supposed to laugh, be carefree, and tolerate injustices by being team players, preparing them for adulthood of the same. Callous adults may tell them to “smile” or “suck it up.”

More and more, the promise of the American middle class may be an illusion reserved for the lucky few, recently nicknamed the 1 percent. Hard work and jumping through hoops may not be enough to reach the American Dream. Kids that realize this early may not be able to handle it. Not at all. What can we do to ease their pain?

English teachers (me) may tell them that high school is a very short part of their lives and that there are some great opportunities they can take advantage of while in high school. This is not enough, this telling. They need to experience this, themselves, in a real and meaningful way and without a gun.

We are shocked yet again that a massacre could take place in a school setting, a place of nurturing, fostering, encouragement. One size does not fit all. One man’s nurturing is another man’s punishment. I say man because nearly all school shooters have been male in gender orientation.

When I surveyed my own students to learn if they indeed felt safe at school, they did not answer me in a straightforward way. They wanted to know if I would lunge at an armed intruder and what I would do to protect them. Someone could walk into our classroom at any moment, and they often do (other students on their way to the restroom, mostly) due to a door that is open to cross-ventilate the room.

There is no fence around our campus; therefore, it is an open campus. Visitors must “report to the office” but often don’t take the time to walk there first, for convenience’ sake.

Do I need a fence, a gun, and a bodyguard to teach?

What I do need is to have students in a wider variety of programs and educational settings so they are able to rack up many positive experiences as they grow and learn to nurture others and not only their own (sometimes violent) dreams.

Susan Kay Anderson teaches English at Pahoa High School and Hawaii Community College on the Big Island. She has taught in island schools for nearly two decades.