At almost the same time on Sept. 10, 2025, there were two fatal shootings at two separate schools: Evergreen High School and Utah Valley University. I walked into my classroom and quietly watched my college students scan their phones and share images with one another. As I set my notes down on the lectern, I made the decision that we wouldn’t have a normal class. And we wouldn’t the next day either.
It just so happens that one of the classes I’m teaching this semester is titled, “Imagining the apocalypse.” When I recall my own middle school thoughts of nuclear war and disaster preparedness, we hid under our individual metal and wood desks with our hands over our heads, somehow believing that this would save us. Students today, as we know so well, practice active shooter drills and many hallways in the campus buildings where I teach have active shooter protocol posters. Schools haven’t felt safe for a long time, but our political leaders don’t have the motivation or the will to make it any different for young people. I haven’t heard school shootings described as an apocalypse yet, but aren’t they?
There are times as a teacher when my only hope is that I can bring some calmness and perspective to current events. Sept. 10 and 11 were two of those days. I let students keep their phones on their desks and several of them regularly updated the class on breaking news. The news was, as expected, confusing and varied. Students had very distinct impressions of Kirk and who shot him, but the overriding belief was that no one should die for expressing themselves. The conversations drifted from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Kirk and not their specific messages. Rather, they saw people espousing their beliefs in public forums and being murdered for speaking out.
I moderated conversations between students and asked questions during those two days of classes. Although I was a political science major and loved to debate, I often didn’t know what I was talking about, but with conviction! The typical hubris of a 19-year-old. I make it a practice not to debate in class but rather to share information as best I can. In my personal life, it’s easy for me to avoid engaging in political discussions on social media because I am stymied by a kind of fear of not knowing the whole story. With my students we are sometimes learning information at the same time, so we exercise caution and determine legitimate sources together.
As the students continued to update each other on the investigation into the Kirk shooting, I flashed back to the 1990s as I eagerly awaited my subscriptions to Mother Jones, The Weekly Standard, The New Republic and the National Review. I read all of those periodicals because I wasn’t always sure where my beliefs fell but knew that other people would bring me varying perspectives and I could formulate my own ideas. The benefit of monthly magazines was that the authors had more time to be thoughtful. There was time to do research, to follow an investigation for more than just a few hours, to investigate opposing viewpoints, and simply to reflect on how information — and our own knowledge — can change over time. For example, if this was 1995, we wouldn’t get a sense overall of the facts and nuances of the Kirk shooting until the November edition of a magazine. Over the next four weeks, reporters would have time to put together a more complete analysis of the event, the shooter, and gauge what would happen in the legislative and political spheres.
Sometimes I feel so slow because I am still taking the time to find differing viewpoints. As my students rapid-fired information, I knew that I would be going home to read through a lot of different websites. My father used to say that among all of the news sources, the truth was somewhere in between, and I carry that belief as well. I’d rather be deliberate and thoughtful, but our ongoing and rapid media cycle coupled with social media makes me feel that I always must know everything at that very moment when I don’t. When I shifted class focus to these conversations about the shootings, I knew I could share some of the research I’ve been focused on. For example, a chart from the organization More in Common that shows the outliers of each political party and considers about 67% of us the “exhausted majority.” But when students asked what I thought, I told them I was still learning about everything and that it would take me a few days to think through everything. I hope modeling my deliberation gave them the freedom to do the same.
For several days now, a lot of focus has been on shutting down social media or having some kind of “reset.” It is too late. We can’t go back to the heyday of the early internet without ads or chat rooms. We could have remembered this when AI was released from the labs to the public with no guardrails or ethical concerns. It went from something fun and frivolous to copyright theft and more. In between technological advances and revelations, people now are wringing their hands about the overall loss of critical thinking and wondering what will happen to education, the workforce, and the economy.
How do we slow down? How do we regain some of our thoughtfulness? Watching my students work through problems in class every day is like a call to action. That we must find our ability to talk with one another again. To find compassion and empathy even when it may not be extended to us. To make the time to be deliberate. To slow down. I wish we could have our lives back without so much media interference. But the only person at this point who can establish guardrails is me.
