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Bill Kennedy writes a weekly for the Michigan Technological
University daily newsletter, Tech .
Here are his comments today re the tragedy at VT.
Teaching at Tech Grief
I entered my classroom Monday afternoon just as the
magnitude of the horror of the events transpiring at
Virginia Tech was coming to light. I knew most of the
students were probably unaware of what had transpired. One
student came up to me, looking quite concerned and upset and
said quietly, “did you hear what happened?”
“I did,” I answered.
So that everybody might become more aware, as the class
filtered in, I put up the website for MSNBC on the classroom
display screen. Everybody turned their attention to the
screen as the speaker described the carnage. There wasn’t
much to say. Some students seemed to acknowledge the
gravity of what they were seeing as they fell into silence,
while others heard the report and almost instantly turned
away and returned to their normal pre-class chatter. A
couple of students offered a few lame attempts at gallows
humor, but their clumsy attempts at levity fell on deaf
ears. Most of the students seemed anxious to move on. So
we did.
It was interesting to me that a class full of students
that normally relishes every conceivable opportunity to go
off task, suddenly seemed quite interested in shifting their
attention from the events at Blacksburg and on to the topic
for the day, which happened to be metacognition.
In some ways I guess choosing to ignore the events of
the daily news has become part and parcel of being a college
student, at least for some. After the 9/11 tragedy, one
university surveyed faculty and reported that only 62% of
them had mentioned or commented on the attack. Thirty-eight
percent reported that they went on with the course material
uninterrupted, never mentioning the attack. Some students
found the lack of comment frustrating and disappointing,
others said they thought getting on with the course material
was the right thing to do.
Most of those students of the faculty members who did
take a moment of class time to discuss the attack or ask for
a moment of silence found those acknowledgements helpful.
The only students who expressed displeasure were the
students of faculty members who notified them that the
attacks had occurred, but then made no comment or offered no
word of support or encouragement.
After thirty years of teaching, I have come to think of
my practice as having a distinctly affective as well as a
cognitive side. Not only are we more knowledgeable in our
subject areas, but most of us have had more life experience
than many of our students. My opinion is that we owe it to
our students to demonstrate that in addition to our content
expertise we are also actively engaged as citizens, parents,
and family members. This doesn’t mean that we need to
advocate for this or that political case or feel the need to
convince our students that our stand on controversial issues
needs to be theirs. But it does mean that we have an
obligation to model the sort of caring and concern that
floods our minds and hearts when we witness something like
the carnage in Blacksburg.
At the end of class, I took a moment to tell my students
that I felt very sad. I didn’t talk about gun control, or
the senseless violence that pervades our culture, or stress,
or mental illness. I just said that I was sad that at a
place very much like this place where we dwell and work,
that such promise and hope was lost through an act of
senseless violence. I told them that I needed to think
about all of this and I told them if they were hurting, that
they should seek out someone to talk to as well. Like or
not, I told them, we’re in this together and we need to
realize that and come to grips with our respective roles as
we teach them to take their places as the leaders of
tomorrow.
Bill Kennedy, Director
Center for Teaching, Learning, and Faculty Development
Michigan Technological Univesity
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