Sometimes I feel like a lone wolf too. At the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, the other six creative writing professors are men; then there’s me.

I’m fairly unflappable, though. Male students love to imitate shows like "Dexter" and movies like "Split." Blood on paper is pretty standard, to be honest. But sometimes a student submits something ominous, and it feels like I swallowed a bullet.

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The first time this happened, “Hugo” submitted an Eminem tribute to my faculty mentor. This was a few semesters before she retired. Hugo was infuriated because she’d had the audacity to line-edit the first draft of his earlier poem. Violent couplets were his retaliation.

“My words are like a dagger with a jagged edge/That'll stab you in the head.”

Of all the male lyricists, from Shakespeare to Komunyakaa, Hugo had selected Slim Shady in all his violent, woman-hating glory. We all liked "8 Mile," but Hugo as Marshall Mathers psyched us out a little.

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A week later, one of Hugo’s friends was waiting for me after Advanced Fiction to show me text messages Hugo had sent him during my class. He was wary of Hugo’s anger and wanted to make me aware. I hate this class. It’s a waste of time. They can all go fuck themselves. Still, we thought, maybe he’s especially sensitive to perceived criticisms, otherwise known as “feedback,” the bread and butter of any class in creative writing.

But the following Monday morning, when my defense attorney husband and I decided to consult CCAP — a database of public circuit court records in Wisconsin — we discovered that Hugo had been cited by the Oshkosh Police Department over the weekend for shooting young women from his balcony with an Airsoft gun. For the first and only time in my teaching career, I cancelled class for safety concerns. The chair of the English Department intercepted Hugo, and a staff member from the Dean of Students Office took him to talk.

They determined that Hugo was just a lonely kid. We needed to be more patient with him — more motherly. Of course, nobody hated his own mother as much as Eminem despised his.

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In my recent Crime Narratives course, I’d assigned “Gradient” by Amy Butcher, in which she writes about Abdul Razak Ali Artan’s attack on students at Ohio State University. As I could not have predicted, the reading due date overlapped with news of the Las Vegas shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival. One student, whose parents survived the tragedy, cried openly.

“How many of you worry about violence when you’re sitting in class?” I asked. Everybody raised a hand. Our basement classroom had no windows, emergency exits or cell phone reception.

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Every weekday, my own five children are stowed away in public schools, and I’m grateful for their ALICE (Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate) training. I listen for sirens and wonder, to whom do I owe my allegiance, my biological children or my students, sitting ducks in their retro tablet arm chairs?

I teach best when I can face the door. Sometimes, when a student excuses himself to the bathroom, my heart bursts when he re-appears, a figure in the doorway. College classrooms are open to the public; nobody has trained us yet.

Once in my Memoir course, a student named “Sully” veered off-course, his impenetrable voice telling us he’d left crystal quartz behind his ear flap too long. He might have brain damage. He boasted about his all-meat diet and talked with his fists. Veins in his neck throbbed with every gesture.

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He confessed to me mid-semester that he’d been “kicked out” of his degree program in social work. I assumed his strange behavior was to blame and wondered why, if one program head ousted him, he’d been permitted to enroll in my course without the least bit of warning.

Then, shortly after this revelation, Sully showed up to Memoir thirty minutes late. He charged through the door — a man on a mission — grinding his jaw and pumping his clenched hands at his sides. His sweaty face beat an angry dent against thin air, and we all ducked, in perfect sync, terrified to see what he would do next.

As it turned out, in talking to students privately afterward, we’d all been nervously waiting in our collective consciousness for Sully to break.

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On the first day of any semester, I take inventory. Which students appear distressed, angry, volatile or threatening? I plug their names into CCAP to further assess what we’re up against for the next 14 weeks.

This January, between the Las Vegas shooting and the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting in Parkland, Florida, a non-traditional student with a restraining order on his record showed up as an auditor in my three-week course. He locked me in his gaze for three hours.

When “Charles” continued to behave badly three days in a row, leering from the front row, and at times hijacking discussions with nonsensical ribbons of thought, I decided, as in Hugo’s case, to consult our chair. She suggested I call the Dean of Students Office, which I was reluctant to do. As UW Oshkosh grappled with bankruptcy and state-wide deficits, administrators seemed to prioritize retention and so-called “inclusive excellence” over instructor complaints about safety.

When I called anyway and described my feelings of unease, the staff member placated me with Dr. Seuss-like rhymes: “Remember, there’s a whole range of strange.” And then he lectured me on empathy.

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“Feeling threatened,” he clarified, “is not the same thing as being threatened.”

Upon hanging up the phone, I sat motionless, trying to reconcile the startling contradictions of my professional life. Certain male colleagues referred to me as “Little Miss Sunshine” and “the nurturing one.” They blamed me for grade inflation, convinced students liked me — to use an old sexist insult — because I was “easy” and not because I was smart. But if I ever expressed resistance to working with threatening male students, I wasn’t easy-going and nurturing enough.

Fourteen years’ worth of sexist workplace insults returned to me like rapid fire. She’s hormonal, menopausal, a kid sister, just a little girl, pronouncements from men in relative positions of power.

Since I began teaching at UW Oshkosh in 2004, we’ve witnessed our share of student violence. A disgruntled student packed a hatchet in his backpack. Another posted so-called gun porn on Twitter and mentioned Women in Literature. A senior biology major was arrested and sentenced to 40 months in federal prison for making ricin, a deadly toxin that is basically a chemical weapon. Most tragically, another UW Oshkosh student killed three people on the Trestle Trail Bridge in Fritse Park just 17 miles from campus before committing suicide.

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For days after calling the Dean of Students Office about Charles, I felt angry, remembering how the same office — different staff members, long since gone — had treated me and my now retired female colleague after demanding intervention with Hugo.

Maybe we looked hysterical waving our red flags.

Or maybe being a woman in this workplace actually drives me to think irrationally — if a student shoots me, that’ll teach everyone a lesson. But of course, there’s no lesson to be had. Everyone, everywhere, keeps sliding back down the learning curve. It’s just too steep to climb.