I’m a teacher, a profession that is growing more dangerous by the year. I was concerned about the high school boys I know, so I taught a class called “On Killing.”

The title comes from Dave Grossman’s book, “On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society.”

The class was made up of almost all at-risk boys. Some of these kids had nine-hour-a-day video-game addictions. Some had never read a book before. I warned the kids about the difficulty, then assigned the reading.

They ate it up.

Why? Because they’re surrounded by death. These kids “kill” every day in video games. They’ve been watching killing on television since they were toddlers. They see it at the movies. Their friends are being killed in the streets and in their schools.

It’s a topic of interest.

There was a debate all semester about the root cause of violence in our society. Guns. Video games. But I took the class somewhere else. We talked about empathy.

Many of these kids had horror stories for biographies. A couple of them expressed a concern to me in private that they didn’t feel empathy for others. That they were cold-hearted. Dead.

I think what they were really telling me was that they were scared. They were in touch with a darkness within themselves, and that darkness frightened them. Perhaps the fear they were expressing was that they would grow up and become like the adults in their lives. The men and women who had abused them.

One day, a teen approached me after class. “I don’t feel nothin’,” he said. “Sometimes I think about bad things.”

I started walking, headed for the school exit, and let him talk. When we got back to campus, I asked how he felt about his 2-year-old brother.

It was clear from his response that he would do anything in the world to protect that little boy.

I asked him, “Have you ever thought about offering that to yourself?”

“Offering what?”

“That type of outrage.”

He wore a blank look.

“It angers you the way they treat your little brother, right?”

The next day, I told my class that for the first time in human history, we have children acting alone to commit mass murder. That surprised them. Kids had been killing kids in schools their entire lives.

According to Grossman, the first instance of a child acting a lone to commit mass murder was in the 1970s. There were a few more incidents in the 1980s. Then there was an explosion of mass murder committed by children acting alone in the 1990s. The trend continues today.

“The important thing to remember,” I told them, “is that this phenomenon is very new to the world. It’s not normal. Which means something is wrong.”

Then, the teen I had spoken with said, “There’s no empathy. The villain in the movies is always out for revenge. It’s no different with kids who shoot up their schools. Those kids are out for justice, to right a wrong. That’s how they see it.”

By the end of the semester I was giving homework assignments like this: “What type of father do you want to be?”

“Do you have a choice?” I’d ask them. “Can you decide the type of man you are going to be?”

That was our curriculum. It had been all along. To get them to make a conscious choice. To hear their visions for their own futures. To ask them to consider how they wanted to treat themselves.

The troubled teen and I continued to talk after class. We talked about what it would mean for him to offer the same type of protection, the same type of love to himself, as he offered his baby brother.

By Christmas, he had an answer.

“This might sound a little weird,” he told me, “but I started tucking my little brother in at night. When I tuck him in, I talk to him. Kind of like how you talk to me. I tell him things. But in the back of my mind, I know that I’m also talking to myself, like me when I was a kid.”

If we don’t parent ourselves, who will? If we don’t have empathy, compassion for ourselves, who will? I’ve seen what happens when kids hate themselves.

Benjamin Dancer (benjamindancer.com) is a high school teacher at Jefferson County Open School.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by e-mail or mail.