Jessie Hennen

Dear President Trump,

I am so excited about my gun, I can’t wait! I’m glad you’ll be sending them to us teachers. We are so trustworthy and so eager to protect our students. Hooray, hooray.

I just, I mean, I’m sorry, sir, but I have a few tiny little questions. The main one is, I guess: where am I supposed to keep it?

Sorry! It’s just, female professionalism and all…  I usually wear things that don’t, like, have pockets. So: if you want me to keep a gun on me, am I supposed to start? Should I go out and buy a bunch of dresses baggy enough to hide a holster?

Haha. No, of course not! I might be kind of old, at twenty-eight, but these gams have a few years of shapeliness left, all right. Of course you wouldn’t want me to wreck my lines like that.

Okay, so…. no pockets, no holster. What if I just held it? Like through the lessons? It might help me keep order! Ha. But I should warn you – I am kind of flighty and quirky. I lose things like my phone and my coffee mug about four times a day, and I stop class to make my students find them. (They love this game.) The same thing is going to totally happen with the gun – I just know that I’ll forget it’s a gun and like set it on the whiteboard ledge or something. And I guess I don’t need to know too much about guns to have one, but that seems like a real faux pas.

Okay, so: the desk, right? Because that seems like an idea! Desks have a lot of pockets. (Ha, sorry. So excited. On a desk they’re called drawers. Desk pockets!) A drawer it is! Much safer.

I’m just trying to plan my day, the way we teachers like to –  you know, really walk through the activity before we do it. So. Bam bam bam, oh no, it’s a shooting. I stop close-reading that story right away, perk up my head, throw down the marker, and run for the gun! Right?

Second question: do the students know I have a gun?

I mean, I can see it either way. On the one hand, maybe it’s better if nobody knows the gun is there, because then any teacher could at any time be the one with a gun. Perhaps you don’t always want to arm the bald Republican gym teacher! Maybe it should be, you know, me, the one with the MFA. Students will learn to eye my desk with suspicion and awe. (As they should!)

Or else they won’t, and one day they’ll just find it while a sub is in and they’re hunting through the drawers for candy. Who knows?

Maybe it’s better if they do know I have it, because that way it’s going to be like you say – they’ll come to school all relaxed and chill and confident, no hint of the sitting duck about them. They’ll know that their English teacher will be poised to leap into action the second the bullets start flying!

But then, hm. When the hallways start a-war-zonin’, the kids are obviously going to want to help me find the gun, right? They are so helpful.

Yeah. Mostly I teach middle school, and they love being heroes. But they’re not qualified to wield a gun, not like me, the teacher, with her advanced degree in creative writing.

So probably the gun should be locked in there, the desk, behind a code. I mean, we have codes for iPads, why not guns! Boop boop boop, there’s the gun, I turn around, I destroy the intruder, I am a hero.

A question: that’s going to take me a little bit of time, even if I totally remember the code the first time through. (Which I probably will not, because hopefully – God willing! – the gun code is not going to be one I’ll use a lot of the time. Sorry! Plus, you know, panic.)

Do you think I should rearrange the seating chart? Like…. really consider who should be closest to the door?

Anyway, thanks! I hope you have some answers. (I know this is kind of long for you, but I really tried to write it with short enough words. As we English people say, know your audience!)

So excited!!!!!

Yours,

Ms. Hennen