Tuesday night I had a quiz scheduled for my Java I class. At least I call them quizzes. Everyone knows they are exams, but calling it a quiz is an attemtpt to lessen the pressure. I count the overall grade on the quizzes as 25% of the total grade and count their best 5 out of 6, so each quiz is really 5% of the total grade, with one mulligan.
Projects (aka homework: programs they have to create) counts 50% of the grade. The final projects, which are individually created to be different for each student, counts 20% and the catch-all “classroom participation” is the other 5%.
Anyway, after letting them ask any question they wanted for the first 15 minutes, we started the quiz at 6:15pm. At around 6:35 one of my students finished (she’s good!), asked when she should return and went to her car “to chill.”
At 6:40pm the alarms went off.
Cross-posted at Daily Kos in Teacher’s Lounge
I told the students to get the hell out of the building. Some grabbed their stuff and some didn’t. I grabbed my purse and my bag as I left, but left homeworks I was grading spread across the teacher’s station. I managed to get the students all out and we went down the closest stairwell (the classroom is on the second floor).
That was a mistake. All of the students on the first floor were using that exit to leave the building, meaning we were essentially stuck in the stairwell for too many minutes. Next time…there’s always a next time…I will instruct my students to take the stairwell on the other side, which was essentially unused.
Why the students on the first floor did not exit through the doors in the front of the building…not available to those in the basement or the second floor…is beyond me.
Before I even crossed the street towards the gym, the rumors were rampant.
“Someone called the school threatening to shoot up the building.” Then why were people standing in the open in front of the gym across the street?
“Someone fired a shot in the building!” The building is an echo chamber. We all would have heard it. People in the toll booth on the Parkway would have heard it.
When the bomb squad showed up, questions were pretty much answered for me. We were told we would be let back into the building when the bomb-sniffing dog was done.
I imagine the dog is trained to detect chemicals. This was the Science Building. We were not going to get inside before the end of class.
So classes were canceled for the night. Some of my students located me and submitted their exams. Some didn’t. So we’ll try again this coming Tuesday, with a new quiz over the same material.
Every single one of the teachers I spoke with had the same thought. Someone was not prepared for an exam. Nobody was taking it seriously, since if a bomb really went off in the building, we would likely have been showered with bricks, mortar, and shrapnel.
But as long as the cops and an administrator were standing within a few feet of the front door, and the students were only backed up a few feet, how is one to believe it was serious?
One thing I did note. As a member of the Student Affairs Committee this year, where the subject of everyone wearing badges was broached (and pretty much rejected by the faculty…this is not a closed campus, so it is unfeasible), badges wouldn’t have helped in the least.
Unless maybe to identify us if a bomb might have gone off…in which case that’s a pretty darn gruesome idea.
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…I write about this on the web and don’t bring my observation to the attention of the administrators instead because I’m on enough committees already.
Seems like you would have known about the stair problem from them.
we have evacuation plans for all of the buildings, or so I’ve been told, but nobody knows them. Not the profs, not the students, nobody.
We had a comical evacuation at one of my old campuses, once — one of the lower division chem profs chucked a little too much sodium in the water beaker for the “hey, stuff blows up!” demo, resulting in a much larger-than-anticipated explosion — and we all had to evacuate as a matter of policy (since the alarms went crazy). Chem departments being what they are, the gigantic BOOM got a significant round of applause as we left — but with two exits to the building, there was a huge traffic jam for us getting out as well, so I remember thinking, if this were an actual problem, perhaps resulting in nasty vapors, we’d be fucked.
I’m actually surprised that the fake bomb threats don’t happen more often, actually.
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…about 10 blocks away. They are supposed to gather in our gym in case of alarms going off, so we see them often.
the issue of fear and danger in general… we seem to be the most afraid and the least prepared for any sort of danger from classroom bombs and terrorists to hurricanes and tornados! If we were really afraid wouldn’t we be better prepared to deal with danger?
strange beings these humans!