The Teacher I Remember, and the Country We Became

The closest personal connection I have to the epidemic of gun violence in the United States is not through a statistic, or a headline, or a political argument.

It is through a teacher.

His name was Steve Wolf, and from 2010 to 2011, he was my AP Environmental Science teacher at Millbrook High School in Raleigh, North Carolina. At the time, I knew him as a young, energetic, slightly eccentric teacher who made science feel connected to real life. He was serious about the subject, but not in a way that drained the room. His class had a pulse.

He was also a runner.

That mattered to me. I was a runner too, and I remember being impressed that he would go for runs during his lunch break. There was something quietly heroic about that to me as a teenager: an adult with a job, a classroom, responsibilities, and still, in the middle of the day, he made time to go outside and run. It made running seem less like a school sport and more like a lifelong form of freedom.

He also introduced me, indirectly, to Dean Karnazes.

Mr. Wolf had read Ultramarathon Man, and he told us stories from the book: Dean Karnazes turning thirty and transforming his life through running, pushing himself through absurd distances, ordering a pizza during a long run and folding it into a kind of burrito while still moving down the road. Those stories lodged somewhere in me. They had that teenage magic of being ridiculous and inspiring at the same time. They suggested that the human body was not just a machine for getting through the day, but a strange instrument capable of endurance, comedy, pain, and joy.

Recently, I finally listened to Ultramarathon Man on audiobook while going on some longer runs of my own. Hearing Dean tell those stories firsthand brought me back, unexpectedly, to that classroom. I realized that part of my love for running had passed through Mr. Wolf first. Not as a formal lesson, but as a spark.

There were other sparks too.

Mr. Wolf was from the Detroit area, and he loved the White Stripes. I did too. That shared enthusiasm meant something to me at the time. He sent me videos related to Detroit urban decay, and I remember how that opened up a whole atmosphere: abandoned buildings, post-industrial America, music with garage-rock teeth, the beauty and sadness of places people had partly left behind.

He also had a Wu-Tang Clan poster on the wall of his classroom and would rap little snippets from Wu-Tang to entertain the class. That detail still makes me smile. It was funny, but it was also part of what made him memorable. He did not seem like a teacher assembled from a template. He had tastes, stories, enthusiasms, habits. He was a whole person in front of us, not just a person delivering curriculum.

And he taught the class well. I remember the environmental science itself. I remember feeling that the subject mattered. The atmosphere of the class helped make the material feel alive.

Years later, I learned that Mr. Wolf had become principal of Oxford High School in Michigan. That was the school where, on November 30, 2021, a mass shooting took place.

I remember how strange and awful that discovery felt. The national problem had always been real to me, but mostly at a distance. School shootings were part of the American background noise, which is itself a horrifying sentence to be able to write. They were tragedies that happened to other communities, other families, other hallways.

Then suddenly there was a face attached to one of them that I knew.

Not one of my closest friends. Not a family member. Not someone I had spoken to in years. But someone who had once stood in front of a classroom and helped shape me. Someone whose stories and habits had entered my life and stayed there.

At some point I saw a video of him after the shooting. What struck me was not any particular sentence. It was his face. His eyes.

I could still recognize him, but barely. The person I remembered had been animated, funny, full of motion. The person in the video seemed marked by something immense. I do not want to overstate what I could know from a video. Grief and trauma are not things a viewer can diagnose through a screen. But I remember feeling, with a kind of physical sadness, that he looked hollowed out by what had happened.

That image has stayed with me.

When people talk about gun violence in America, the conversation often becomes abstract very quickly. Rights. Laws. Culture. Mental health. Policing. Schools. Poverty. Alienation. Masculinity. Technology. Family breakdown. Security procedures. Warning signs. Responsibility. Freedom.

All of those matter. The issue is complex because the country is complex. I do care about liberty. I also care about safety. I do not think either word should be used as a club to beat the other one unconscious.

But sometimes the abstraction becomes a fog machine. It fills the room until no single human being is visible anymore.

So I think about Mr. Wolf.

I think about the teacher who ran at lunch.

I think about the teacher who told a class of high school students about Dean Karnazes running through the night and eating pizza on the move.

I think about the White Stripes, Detroit, Wu-Tang, environmental science, and the strange alchemy by which a teacher’s enthusiasms can become part of a student’s life years later.

And then I think about the principal in that video.

I think about how many people in this country have been changed in similar ways: students, parents, teachers, principals, nurses, first responders, siblings, friends, entire towns. People who did not become famous. People whose before-and-after is known only to those close enough to remember both versions.

There is a question I do not know how to answer cleanly:

How many points of no return had we already crossed by the time that shooting happened?

And how many more have we crossed since?

Maybe nations do not usually reach one dramatic point of no return. Maybe they cross hundreds of small ones. A failure to act here. A shrug there. A ritualized argument. A preventable tragedy absorbed into the news cycle. A set of families permanently altered. A school reopened. A community told to heal. The rest of us move on until the next headline arrives.

But people do not simply “move on” from these things. Not really.

They carry them.

That is what I saw, or thought I saw, in Mr. Wolf’s face: the carrying.

I do not know what the solution is. I distrust easy answers to problems this deep. But I also distrust the kind of complexity that becomes an excuse for paralysis. Somewhere between slogans and despair, there has to be a serious national will to make fewer people carry this kind of weight.

This reflection is not an argument with a neat ending. It is an act of gratitude, and maybe a small witness.

I am grateful to Mr. Wolf for the teacher he was to me. I am grateful for the way his love of running and music helped shape my own. I am grateful that a high school science class could leave behind not only facts, but momentum.

And I am sad that someone who gave so much energy to students had to stand so close to one of the worst things this country keeps allowing to happen.

When I run now, listening to the stories he first told me about years ago, I feel that old thread tighten again. A classroom in Raleigh. A runner at lunch. Detroit rock. Wu-Tang on the wall. A book about endurance. A school in Michigan. A face changed by grief.

A country still deciding what it is willing to protect.

Or what it is willing to keep losing.