Please stop using the VT shooter's writings to analyze him. [View All]

[knitter4democracy]

He was an English major. English majors read and write disturbing things. It's what we do. We're the ones reading Shakespeare and making sure we know what all the words mean and trying to figure out what he was really trying to say (and some of his stuff is highly sexual and disturbing).

The problem is it's a fallacy to say that what someone wrote for a class reveals his deepest darkest thoughts. If everyone who writes dark, disturbing stuff is mentally ill, then we should lock up some of our most popular authors, including Stephen King (who has had some of his books banned from high schools). Writers sometimes write of those things to explore the darker side of humanity, to reveal a character's real motivation, or to explore the gothic or sublime. It doesn't mean they're all mentally ill.

And, as a former high school English teacher, please lay off of how he wrote. We don't know what the assignment was, we don't know that playwriting was his preferred medium (poets often don't write plays well and vice versa), and we don't know why his classmate kept the copies and then posted them.

I am concerned that Nikki Giovanni felt so unsafe as to demand his removal from her class. That reveals far more than his writings do. She based that decision on his behavior in class, not so much on his poetry, from the account I read on Comcast's article. I had a student like that in student teaching, and he did get removed from my class when it was found that his family had faked living in the district and hidden his expulsion from another district nearby. It wasn't his writing that made me so concerned, it was the constant suggestive comments and sexual harrassment.