By Jim Raykie

Editor, The Herald

Two days after the shootings at Virginia Tech, I left The Herald and planned to spend at least a few minutes with my journalism students on Wednesday evening talking about the tragedy.

Since Monday when we spent part of class talking about the killings, I was wondering how the conversation would play out after two days of digesting all of the information. That was before it was announced that NBC News had been sent a package by Cho Seung-Hui, Virginia Tech’s mass murderer.

I scrapped a big part of the lesson plan and we watched a TV monitor as the news unfolded, and the conversation switched from the killings to Cho’s profanity-laced manifesto and series of chilling videos and photographs he sent in the package, mailed from Blacksburg in between the time he killed to students until he murdered 30 others.

You have to know when your students want to watch and want to talk about news events, especially as horrific as the Virginia Tech killings. While that classroom discussion might not be appropriate in some disciplines, it is in a class where students are studying the news and how and why journalists do what they do.

My students had a lot of questions, and none of us had many answers. Again, such shocking news has a way of making people think about their own mortality, and realize that this kind of tragedy can happen anywhere, not just at Virginia Tech.

Some were concerned about the “copy-cat” possibilities, and wondered if the airing of Cho’s message not only might spur others, but give him the limelight after his suicide that he intentionally sought.

I found a recurring statement on network and cable news on Wednesday night after class to be simplistic at best. Some analysts gave the impression that the airing of Cho’s “message from the grave” was a major setback in Virginia Tech’s ability to move forward and to be able to put Monday’s events behind.

It will take Virginia Tech years – maybe generations – to put Monday’s events that included 33 deaths in the background. It has been almost 37 long years since the shootings on May 4, 1970 at Kent State University during student unrest, and nearly four decades later, the memory of students slain by the National Guard still haunts the campus. Virginia Tech will always live with this tragedy, the worst of its kind the history of our country.

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