Sonoma State Star

Issue date: 3/4/08 Section: News

Virgina Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho in the clip that he sent to NBC News after his murders. Co-chair of the "When Silence Explodes," Noelle Oxenhandler, hopes that the SSU event will help students learn to channel anger in creative and healthy ways. [Click to enlarge]

The English Department and Hutchins Dialogue Center are gearing up to co-host a commemorative event in memory of those who died at Virginia Tech last year. The event, called "When Silence Explodes," will take place on April 16 from noon until 2:30 p.m. in Schulz 3001.
The program will feature a commemorative section dedicated to those who were killed in the shootings, which will include poetry reading and possibly a musical performance.
Subsequently occurring will be a teach-in and panel discussing ways to identify students in distress, and how to encourage people to channel despair or natural emotions of aggression creatively and in a healthy way.
The panel will be made up of experts from multidisciplinary backgrounds such as psychological counseling, sociology, school violence and more.
The event is also tied with a writing contest that recently debuted a week ago. The contest, named "The Question Mark Kid Contest", calls for SSU students to write prose or poetry about a time in their life when they have felt unseen, unheard of or unknown, just as Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, might have.
The contest will have a first, second and third prize, each ranging from $50 to $100, and have their work published in "Zephyr," Hutchins' literary magazine. The deadline for submissions is April 1, and all work can be emailed to Questionmark.contest@gmail.com.
"English teachers and teachers in general aren't usually on the frontlines of anything particularly dangerous or dramatic, but this is actually one place where I think teachers are the first to see if a student really is in a state of intense distress," said English Professor Noelle Oxenhandler, co-chair of the event.

Continued...

Page 1 of 2 next >

Article Tools