A Teacher's Perspective on Cho

I teach creative writing at the university level and since Wednesday morning I've thought about how I would have reacted if I'd had Cho Seung-Hui in a creative writing class. Famed poet Nikki Giovanni did. He was silent in her intro class, hiding behind sunglasses and a hat, turning in "tirade"s, and taking photos of women students' legs during class. "There was no writing," she told the Associated Press. "I wasn't teaching him anything, and he didn't want to learn anything." So she wrote to the department chair, who took him on for private sessions. The dean's office and campus police said they couldn't do anything because he hadn't made threats.

And then the semester ended.

I taught a graduate seminar in teaching writing last fall. We discussed an essay about students who write about trauma. The author of the essay criticizes herself for going too far with one student, in having her return to the scene of the event, basically, to rub her nose in it. My students said they would have felt their privacy was violated they'd written about suicide in a creative writing workshop and teacher had talked to them about it. But there's violence--toward self or others--in writing, and there's anti-social, aggressive, disruptive behavior in class. Two different things. When I taught intro creative writing at an art school, I had a few first-year students who wrote about suicide. I remember one of them clearly. I wrote on her paper that she might want to see one of the school psychologists and I also talked to her. I talked to one of the school psychologists, too, who told me she couldn't tell me whether the student had seen her. The student herself later told me she had. And that was it.

But she wasn't disrupting the class. She wasn't writing violent, offensive work, as Cho went on to do in a Virginia Tech playwriting class. What do you do? An expert of some kind on NPR today said that nothing could have been done (I think I'm getting this right), that we all want to have an orderly world and we can't make it that way.

Is that all?

I've had some e-mail exchanges about Cho's writing with my students from last fall. After a crisis, an organization goes over its emergency procedures, or lack of them. When I teach the seminar again in the fall, I'll bring someone in from the administration about handling violent writing and students. Will that be enough? Will I even remember to do it? Because after all--it hasn't happened here.