A new school year is starting. Perhaps you’d think a man who does not, to his knowledge, have any children should avoid wandering up to parents with small kids outside a school. Perhaps you are a fool.

I shoved my microphone in the face of some parents walking their kids to school last week in McKinney. Spoilers: they’re more excited than the kids to be headed back=.

At the fire station across the street, in an effort to bring everyone down, the fire department, paramedics and hospitals were working together on how they’d coordinate response to an active shooter. They invited reporters to show us how they triage [which, apparently, was not just a term they made up on M*A*S*H] patients in a rapidly changing environment.

The fire chief explains running drills like this can help crews train ahead of time so different agencies know how to communicate quickly and so firefighters wouldn’t be overwhelmed if they have to respond to a real call.

For instance, to show them what they might be dealing with, they had a limb guy there showing off some hands.

But for the wee munchkins themselves, school districts are working to make them feel safe and welcome. In Fort Worth, the police chief was greeting kids on their first day.

“Let me bring down the crowd for a moment,” I replied, explaining I was in high school back in Ohio for Columbine. I remember sitting on a bus during a class trip to Washington D.C. when we heard about it. School shootings have happened more frequently since then. Noakes says that constant drum beat of violence affects kids, too.

But #ScaiaBlog isn’t about the negative or even bags of limbs. It’s about expanding possibilities. In that last clip, I talk about how we came and went from the building. Loyal Scaiaholics will recall I was a bit of a rabble rouser in school. These days, your study hall teacher probably wouldn’t give you a hall pass so you could pick up a party sub at Blimpie; your assistant principal probably wouldn’t appreciate you having pizzas delivered during the school day so you could meet the girls in the art class across the hall.

Clear backpacks have been in short supply [It’s almost like they’re trying to keep you from carrying a party sub into the school], so Dallas ISD was handing out free backpacks last week as well as school supplies. They got a donation from Reliant to hand out school supplies, leading me to ask both Reliant Energy and Dallas City Councilman Omar Narvaez, “Where’s the Trapper Keepers? How are these kids supposed to learn without trapper keepers?!”

Narvaez and I talked about how schools are trying to shift their focus away from memorization and toward learning how to solve problems. You wouldn’t know it from my description of my high school experience, but I was a bit of an instigator and not focused on my studies. It’s possible I failed calculus 4th quarter senior year, but I scored well enough on the AP exam that I only had to take one semester of math in college.

And Narvaez makes a strong point: Math is for suckers.

[Note from Alan’s high school calculus teacher: You’ll notice Narvaez absolutely did not say math is for suckers.]

Even though I showed less interest in schoolwork than rabble rousing, I still remember how my teachers challenged me. One of my English teachers urged me to read Shoeless Joe and write a paper on how it was different from Field of Dreams. In a more substantial lesson, I still remember him as the man who led me to the revelation that Mongo and Mr. Papadapoulis were the same person. Schools can be the marketplace of ideas.

You may have noticed a lot people spend time arguing with each other about politics on Facebook. In addition to shifting more toward problem-solving skills, schools are starting to move toward helping kids learn how to talk about differences without yelling, “Leftist!” or “Fascist!” when someone says they prefer a popover to Yorkshire pudding.

Maybe I’m becoming too risk averse. I can’t even remember the last time I snuck out of work to buy a party sub.

I also talked with a non-profit that works in marginalized neighborhoods to help kids find the activity they’re passionate about and potentially turn that into a career. If they’d been around back in my day, maybe they’d have convinced me, since I enjoy driving places to pick up food, to become a cross country trucker. I’m almost positive they’re currently making more than radio news reporters.

Loyal Scaiaholics will recall my suite of get rich-quick schemes after I was fired from my last job for getting water damage to a car in a hurricane. And the non-profit, Big Thought, reports they want kids to learn to take chances so they don’t turn into some guy who just blogs about thinking about taking chances some day, hypothetically.

She explains that if you fail forward, you’re taking a step toward solving a problem.

“So what you’re saying is I should start a podcast!” I replied. “A podcast about… something.”

The one thing I know is by doing nothing, I’m doing it wrong. I feel like I need a drink but there’s simply no Beer Frontier to drive thru.

The past couple years have been a beatdown, but I think the start of this school year can give us all hope for the future. In my case, the next time I get fired, I’m going to call it “failing forward.”