It’s A Long, Long, Long Way Down

When I was in the 3^rd Grade I did something stupid, or at least they told me it was something stupid.  On one of the final days of that school year, a friend and I opened the fire escape window in our classroom.  The fire escape was similar to the rest of the windows in the classroom, except that while the other windows had screens and only opened halfway out horizontally (so there was never any danger in opening them), the fire escape window had no screen and opened like a door (but it was still halfway up the wall so that you couldn’t just fall out of it).

Thinking back on it now, I have no idea why it was even there.  The classroom was on the second floor (and the first floor was half underground, so it wasn’t all that high), but it’s not like there was anything outside that could help you get down to the ground.  If you were to use this to escape the classroom during a fire, you would be risking life (or at least limb) with a 12 foot jump.

Anyways, my friend and I were sent to the Principals office where our best explanation for what we did was that it was a nice day outside and we wanted to open the window.  I don’t really remember getting in trouble for the incident because it was towards the end of the school year; I was just scolded because it was a really dangerous thing to do. 

The thing is that it wasn’t a dangerous thing to do.  Even if a student had jumped out the window that day they probably wouldn’t have suffered lasting injuries, and the fact that they would have needed to actively climb out the window and jump out showed that it really wasn’t dangerous at all.  There was no functional danger in opening that window; the teachers were mad at us because of how overprotective people are in the United States.

***

A couple weeks ago I was walking back from my class at the end of the day when I saw some students in a classroom washing the windows.  Our school doesn’t have all that much money available so the students do pretty much all of the cleaning.  Before and after school students wash the floors of the rooms (I have even seen them cleaning the disgusting bathrooms before) and they oftentimes are doing this more happily than they do the homework I assign them.

So it was not shocking to me that the students were washing the windows of the school, rather what was shocking to me was how they were washing the windows of the school.  These students would stand on the window sill, open the windows (which are horizontally sliding windows) and literally walk outside of the building.  This wouldn’t be a problem if our school only had one floor, but it is actually the complete opposite. 

These students were walking out the windows of the school FOUR STORIES UP.

When I walked into the English office one of my first year students, Becky, was washing a window there.  When I first entered the room everything looked fine as she was just washing the inside part of the window.  I then became very concerned when she stepped up onto the window sill to wash the outside of the window.  She rotated around so that her face was outside the window looking in and hung out by actually holding onto the window itself while she washed it. 

She was hanging out the window with nothing below her for four stories like there was no problem.  While Gavin and I looked back and forth in complete awe between the window and each other, the rest of the teachers in the office were seemingly oblivious to the fact that this student was hanging out a fourth story window with only one hand’s grip keeping her from a long fall.

This would have never happened in America.

***

“It’s happening!! RUN,” a teacher yelled at me as the fire alarm went off at our school.  She had told me earlier in the day that we were going to have a fire drill, but I never could have expected the madness that ensued when the alarm went off.  As would be expected in America, I started gingerly walking out the door of the office towards the stairs when people started sprinting past me and gently trying to make me move faster by pushing my shoulder.

“Faster, faster,” I was told as I walked down the stairs at a slightly quicker pace.  When I got down to the second floor of the school I saw the principal yelling in Chinese and waving his arms in an attempt to encourage people to move out of the building as fast as possible.  He was holding a stopwatch.

The students were running down the stairs and some were pushing each other to get to the door faster.  I was shocked that nobody actually fell down and hurt themselves.  As I made it to the first floor teachers and students were pushing me along so that I would move faster.  Luckily, I made it outside soon enough where I saw the gym teachers timing everybody with stopwatches and discussing the results with the principal. 

When I saw Gavin we just started laughing about what had happened.  I wanted to tell some of the other teachers how unsafe their chaotic fire escape methods were, but I don’t think they could have possibly understood.  As we walked back inside I reminisced about how a ‘Chinese Fire Drill’ amongst bored American teenagers involves everybody getting out of the car at a stoplight, running around the car, and getting back in using a different door.  As most people who do this have never seen an actual Chinese fire drill, I was shocked at how similarly chaotic both events were.

***

A couple years ago, at a tailgate before a Notre Dame Football game, I was introduced to a survivor of the September 11^th attacks.  This man had worked in the World Trade Center and was actually in one of the buildings when the planes hit them.  He told me his story of September 11^th and I was shocked by two things: he was very high in the building when the plane hit (I can’t remember how high), and he survived by taking the elevator down to the bottom and running out of the building. 

Everything about his story goes against conventional American wisdom.  This man survived because he did exactly the opposite of what conventional American wisdom would tell us to do.  When everybody else was running down the stairs, he acted in the face of what we have been taught and took the elevator down to the bottom making it out alive.

So what does this all mean?

While the chaos of the Chinese fire drill might have seemed insane to me at the time, maybe it was exactly the way that people should treat a practice run of escaping a building when there is a fire.  Maybe the conventional American wisdom on how to get out of a building during a disaster is completely wrong.  Americans have become so apathetic to the idea of fire drills that some people didn’t even leave our dorm when fire alarms went off during college, and those that did make it outside did it slowly and begrudgingly. 

Likewise, maybe our teachers were wrong to get so upset with us all those years ago when we opened the fire escape window in our 3^rd Grade classroom.  I’m not saying that we should necessarily allow students to hang out windows that are even higher like I have seen here in China, but maybe there is a middle ground between being too cautious and overprotective and being completely ambivalent to chaotic fire drills and dangerous window washing. 

I don’t know where this middle ground is or where the line should be drawn between stupid actions and life-saving ingenuity, but maybe I’ll just move a little faster the next time we have a fire drill.