Eloquence From An English Professor At Northern Illinois University

I'll be going back to room 209 in Reavis Hall, right next door to Cole, where I teach creative nonfiction in the English department. I took a walk Thursday through the building. It was eerily quiet. I peeked in the window at my empty classroom. It looked the same, but somehow it looked very different.

In some ways, it will seem odd returning to the subject matter of English 303, dwelling on things like syntax and grammar, narrative voice and imagery. It will seem a bit strange to talk, as I usually do, about the absolute imperative of getting the facts straight at a time when the truth seems all wrong.

Like everyone else here, I worry about my students. Are they all going to come back? Will they be able to go back to what college life is supposed to mean, whatever that is for them?...

...It hits home. My daughter worked on the high-school paper last year with a student who was shot and wounded. Surveys at Virginia Tech after the massacre there last year found that 50 percent of students knew a victim.

Teachers will make sure students know about places to find counseling services. But they are not trained as counselors, and the experts tell us not to try to fill the role. "The classroom is not the place for group therapy," Dr. Flynn [Director of Counseling at Virginia Tech] said. "I had an organic chemistry teacher ask me, 'I don't know what to talk about?" And I told him, 'Talk about organic chemistry'."

Dr. Flynn reminded us that, contrary to the popular notion, targeted shootings on American campuses have been declining in the last 10 years. That's little comfort, of course, if you were sitting in the lecture at Cole Hall a week ago Thursday, or if your son or daughter, your sibling or your friend, was sitting there.

Anything But Erratic, Says Jessica Baty of Her Boyfriend, Steven Kazmierczak

CNN reports:

The girlfriend of the gunman who killed five people and then himself at Northern Illinois University last Thursday told CNN that there was "no indication he was planning something."

Jessica Baty said her boyfriend, Steve Kazmierczak, gave no warning of the terror he planned to unleash at NIU.

"He wasn't erratic. He wasn't delusional. He was Steve; he was normal," Jessica Baty tearfully said in an exclusive interview Sunday.

Baty, 28, had been dating and living with Steven Kazmierczak for two years.

"He was a worrier," she said. He once told her he had "obsessive-compulsive tendencies" and that his parents committed him as a teen to a group home because he was "unruly" and used to cut himself.

He had been seeing a psychiatrist, Baty said, and was taking an anti-depressant to treat depression. But Kazmierczak had stopped taking the medication three weeks ago, "because it made him feel like a zombie," she said.

"He wasn't acting erratic," she said. "He was just a little quicker to get annoyed."

She knew he had purchased at least two guns. He told her they were for home protection.

On Valentine's Day, Baty was in class at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign where she and Kazmierczak were graduate students studying criminal justice. The students began to talk about a mass shooting taking place at Baty and Kazmierczak's alma mater, NIU in DeKalb.

She didn't think much of it, and her mind drifted to where her boyfriend told her he would be that day -- with his godfather in another town in Illinois.