When the Alarm Rang, Our Teacher Said “Nice Try” and Locked Us In

Maybe she was right, or maybe I just wanted to prove that teachers could make better choices than Mrs. Garrison had made. The summer after my junior year I did a teaching internship at a high school summer program.

On my first day the fire alarm went off during a lab session. It was just a drill, but my body didn’t know that.

My heart rate spiked and my hands started shaking, and for a moment I couldn’t move. But then I looked at the 15 students staring at me, waiting to see what I’d do.

I took a breath, unlocked the classroom door, and led them outside in a calm, orderly line. We stood in the parking lot until the all-clear was given, and none of those students knew that I’d just overcome something huge.

But I knew, and that was enough. I graduated with my teaching degree and got hired at a school district two states away from where I grew up.

It was far enough that nobody knew my history unless I chose to tell them. My first semester teaching was exactly as chaotic and overwhelming as everyone said it would be.

I had 130 students across five classes, and I spent every evening grading papers and planning lessons and wondering if I was doing anything right. But during fire drills I was always the teacher who got my students out the fastest.

I never, not even once, considered that an alarm might be fake or treated safety protocols like they were inconvenient. My students probably thought I was paranoid, the way I practiced evacuation routes and made them memorize emergency procedures.

In my third year of teaching I was eating lunch in the faculty lounge when another teacher mentioned a former colleague who’d lost her license after locking students in during a fire. It took me a moment to realize she was talking about Mrs. Garrison.

The story had become an urban legend in education circles, a cautionary tale they told in teaching programs about the importance of following safety protocols. But in the retelling Mrs. Garrison had become a monster, someone who’d deliberately tried to harm students.

The nuance was gone. Nobody mentioned that she’d been paranoid about cheating, or that she’d eventually tried to save us, or that she’d gotten burned in the process.

She was just the villain in a story about what not to do. I wanted to correct the story, to add the context, but I didn’t because the truth was complicated.

People didn’t want complicated; they wanted clear heroes and villains, obvious lessons and tidy endings. Mrs. Garrison’s story didn’t fit that template.

After 15 years of teaching I still think about that day in the locked classroom. I think about it every time there’s a fire drill, every time I see smoke, every time a student tries to convince me of something that sounds too convenient to be true.

I think about Mrs. Garrison and wonder what happened to her, whether she ever forgave herself for what she did. I think about Isaiah hanging from the window ledge and Daniela breaking down crying and Patricia unconscious in the corner.

I think about the three students who died in rooms where teachers had followed the rules and evacuated properly. I wonder about the randomness of survival.

But mostly I think about the moment when Mrs. Garrison finally understood that the alarm was real. I think about the look on her face when she realized her paranoia had put us all in danger, that moment of horrified comprehension that her choices had consequences she never intended.

I think about it because it reminds me that teaching isn’t just about lesson plans and test scores. It’s about making dozens of small decisions every day, and any one of them could be the difference between students who make it home safely and students who don’t.

It’s about trusting that alarms are real even when they might be fake. It’s about accepting that sometimes you can’t prevent cheating, but you can prevent tragedy.

My students will never know why I’m the teacher who takes fire drills so seriously. They’ll never know why I refuse to lock my classroom door during tests, why I have three different emergency exit plans posted around the room.

They’ll never know about the fire or Mrs. Garrison or what it feels like to watch smoke rise while you’re trapped inside. And that’s okay.

Because every student who walks out of my classroom safely, every fire drill where we evacuate without incident, every test where someone could cheat but I don’t lock the door anyway—that’s me making a different choice than Mrs. Garrison made. That’s me choosing to trust the alarms and protect the students even if it cost me perfect test security.

Some of my students probably do cheat; I’m not naive enough to think they don’t. But I’d rather have students who cheat and live than students who are honest and trapped.

That’s the lesson I learned in that smoke-filled room and it’s the lesson I carry with me every single day I teach. The fire alarm goes off during my finals now and I don’t hesitate.

I unlock the door. I lead my students outside and I count heads to make sure everyone made it.

And if it turns out to be a false alarm pulled by a student trying to avoid a test, well, that’s a problem I can solve later. Because the alternative—the locked door and the rising smoke and the trapped students—that’s not a problem anyone should ever have to solve.

Standing outside during drills, watching my students joke around and complain about the interruption, I sometimes catch myself looking at the windows of our classroom. Second floor, too high to jump safely, with windows that only crank open six inches.