Worried Thoughts, Brave Thoughts About Newtown I, too, have been employing Nancy Rappaport's "worried thought, brave thought" strategies to manage my own sometimes out-of-control emotions surrounding the shooting in Newtown, Conn. Like many of us, I found myself at holiday parties over the weekend, ambivalent and conflicted over conversation about the tragedy, or about anything else. But one friend provided me with the most powerful "brave thought" of all by reminding me of the sacrifices educators made that day - adults who loved "their" children enough to die for them. Like the unforgettable "Let's roll" heroes of the one 9/11 flight that never reached its intended target, they provided the bravest thoughts I could imagine. When all hope was lost for them, they created hope for the rest of us and left it behind. For now, I can find no more words in this space for these deaths and this horror. The best I can do is to gather the finest words of others. Below, under these simplistic "brave thought, worried thought" headings, I'll collect the articles that I, and you, have found most helpful or most thought-provoking. I'm starting with just a few, but I hope you'll help me to add more. If you've read anything that you'd like to see included here, please offer it in the comments, and I'll add the best or most highly recommended articles to the text of the post. Brave thoughts Two Educators Went the Extra Mile for Students: Profiles of the principal and school psychologist who were shot as they tried to tackle the gunman. Resources: Talking and Teaching About the Shooting in Newtown, Conn. The Learning Network editor Katherine Schulten has read all the coverage of the shooting and collected the pieces to which teachers, or parents, might guide older students as they express their interest and grief. The Newtown School Shooting: A Place to Post Your Thoughts offers students 13 and older a place to express themselves about the tragedy. The Motherlode contributor and educator Jessica Lahey on how there's "Not Enough Tape in the World" to hold things together in the wake of the shootings, but how educators - knowing they're fooling themselves with drills and practice lockdowns - will try to teach their students to do it just the same. She also reflected, before the shootings, on what it's like for a teacher to lose a student to death. Worried thoughts Do We Have the Courage to Stop This? Brave thoughts aside, those of us who support increasing our country's regulation of weapons like the AR-15 that authorities say was used in Newtown and in the shootings in Aurora, Colo., this year believe we have reason to worry. "The fundamental reason kids are dying in massacres like this one," Nicholas Kristof writes, "is not that we have lunatics or criminals - all countries have them - but that we suffer from a political failure to regulate guns." "I thought we were going to get somewhere," Steve Barton, a victim in the Aurora shootings, told The Huffington Post of efforts to curb gun violence. Frankly, all we got was silence.