When I was a teacher in training one of my students wrote a poem about sexual abuse. The words were violent, angry, full of palpable pain. It haunted me. I worried about her privacy, and about trying to navigate my duty, my boundaries, and my options as a teacher and a university employee; I asked a supervising professor what he would say to such a student, hypothetically.
His response? “I’d ask her why she was telling ME this stuff.” He then pontificated while plunging down the hall with me rushing beside him to keep up. He wore an irritated look of superiority and disdain, clearly directed at me and at the “hypothetical” student. “It’s not your job to help her,” he told me. “Teach your text and if it’s not on the syllabus, it isn’t your responsibility.”He taught me one thing: to be more careful about whom I asked for advice.
Students, when spreading their composition wings, or poetry wings, or artistic wings of any kind, will visit the dark side of images. Some will open up old wounds, and work through the bleeding in their writing. Some will imagine powerful scenarios where their characters maim or conquer or control. Some will explore supposed taboos, evils, perversions.
And, the truth is, no one should go a-skitter and wide-eyed every time a student writes of violence, or darkness, or evil, or pain. Poets and writers take on such topics – its what they do. But, because teachers have the power of authority, they also have the responsibility to turn an open ear and lead with a directive hand. All teachers have this responsibility, not just writing teachers, not just psychology teachers, but each and every teacher.
University professors have such power over students. It can be gentle, it can be fierce. They can covet it, yearn for it, revel in it, abuse it. They can naively pretend it absent. Regardless of how they feel about it, they have power.
Professor Lucinda Roy is the head of Creative Writing at Virginia Tech. One of her faculty members alerted her to the behavior and writing of Cho Seung-Hui. She, by all accounts, worried and mulled. She urged him to consider counseling; she contacted university student services and finally the police regarding what she considered disturbing writing and behavior.
She didn’t, as my old professor advised, shut down, turn away, or deny the sometimes heavy and messy details of being a teacher. She did her job.
A tragedy is by definition rare. What happened at Virginia Tech is almost unthinkable, and could not have been stopped. We can’t accurately predict truly rare events, and we can’t control such events ahead of time.
We do, however, have a responsibility to respond to each other’s pain and misery. Perhaps it’s the only real lesson here: in a disconnected, disquieted, anxious society we need to be aware of the guy sitting right next to us, right now. We need to engage with each other.
Even if it is messy. Or uncomfortable. Or downright eerie. And, as a university professor, if you don’t think such engagement is your job, you’re in the wrong profession.
If teachers can’t be there for crying students, heartbroken students, isolated students, troubled students, failing students, and ill students – even if just to give them, kindly, the number for the counseling center – then they shouldn’t be in a college or university setting.
Every teacher owes every student consideration, academic and, when needed, otherwise.
Professor Roy gave consideration, to her faculty, to other students, and to this particular student. It didn’t work. Sometimes it just doesn’t. There is nothing more she could have done. This gunman student was not to be stopped. He caused immeasurable pain and stands as a portrait of what is bad, wrong, disastrous, heinous. He’s gotten enough attention.
Keep this uttering on the tip of your tongue: Most people are good. Most of us are teetering, wobbling, sometimes slipping, but fundamentally stable as we carry out an everyday struggle to match our dreams with our realities, our heartbreaks with our mending, our losses with our deep hopes.
Most of us are good at the core, bone deep, utterly, unflinchingly, marred and imperfectly, good. Think of that. Hold that. Give that your attention.
