It gives me sad pause to know that we have reached a point where we need to define appropriate protocols and responses to violent rampages that take place in otherwise safe environments. The day after the Virginia Tech killings, our school, a community college, sent out its "still in progress" emergency preparedness protocols via e-mail for the college community. I suppose I should read them, but I haven't. To read that document would be to internalize the fact that it *could* happen here. To us.

For some reason, I am put in mind of 9/11, which was a teaching day for me, a Tuesday. This class was at the very beginning of my second year in the classroom. The class that day was an afternoon class and it marked the first time I would be called upon to teach a purely tech course. I was nervous about this, and feeling a bit frantic, getting my last minute prep done and reviewing the specifics that I would cover in the intro class. Previous Love and I were still together, although nearing the end.  Things were rough between us. Working on my MBA and going to grad school/teaching in Toronto whilst living outside of the city meant I needed to sleep two or three days per week in the city, away from home. So, that morning, I was in my rented room in a nice house in a nice neighbourhood of Toronto, using dial-up to upload/download information to the school networks and web sites, and not watching TV. I was tying up the phone line with my Internet activities but normally this wouldn't matter. At around 10:30 a.m., I got off line to use the phone and realized that someone had left me a voice mail message. It was Previous Love, telling me in a shaky voice to turn on my TV. I did. I watched, in disbelief, one of the towers come down. I had no backstory and no idea what was happening.

To say it shook me is putting it mildly. I sat on the edge of the bed in my room, first class details forgotten, and stared at the TV screen. Soon, what was known of the story emerged. Shaky video of planes crashing into the towers started to appear. Just before I left for class, unsourced video of people in the Middle East celebrating also appeared.

My head was spinning. Our school is like the United Nations. Our classrooms have all manner of cultures, languages, value systems and belief systems within them. We are hundreds of miles away from New York and in no way directly involved. Therefore, class would go on.

I remember being too numb to get it together to prepare food at home. I remember sitting in my car in the McDonald's parking lot across from campus, glued to the radio and mechanically chewing the non-food I had purchased. I was in two places at once, vacillating between some odd limbo of shock and wondering "what in hell am I going to do with my class?"

I got into my office area about 45 minutes before class and I stared for a while at my now seemingly pointless powerpoints. All the discussion around me was focussed on only one thing – the morning's tragic events – and it wasn't helping my concentration. I kept asking myself, "If I were one of these students, what would I need right now?"  As I was pondering this, the information came to me that most of the campus community was watching the events unfold (and get re-played, again and again) on the brand spanking new theatre-sized projection screen in the Student Centre. "Great," I thought. I'll have a class of deeply traumatized international students who have been watching a jet plane fly into the World Trade Centre on a screen the size of a house.

Once in the very quiet classroom, I took a look at the group before me, glancing up while I set up my laptop. I saw Sikh turbans, a latino or two, and a Star of David gleaming at me from a necklace about mid-point in the room. I saw brown-skinned people, Asians and a freckled white-skinned red head. What they had in common was that they were looking to me for guidance and leadership over the next three hours we were scheduled to spend together. What they also had in common was the fact that they had no experience with each other as classmates as yet. It was too early in the year for that.

This was supposed to be an HTML class which, under the circumstances, seemed like a profoundly trite way to spend time. What to do? What is the appropriate response?

This is one of those times where I was forced to begin the process of speaking to a class well before having clearly thought out what the words were going to be. I actually don't remember what I said. I asked them if they had spent time in the Student Centre, watching. Some had. I tried to start some dialogue and discussion and that seemed to go well. I don't remember it turning into a group therapy session, nor do I remember tears. I remember seeing fear, shock and uncertainty. The process of turning the class inward, and getting them to speak to each other, seemed to be helping. It made the room seem more "safe" and made our task of learning together more tangible, somehow.

As the discussion unfolded, haltingly, I remembered an icebreaker that I had in my desk drawer. I had designed an introductory exercise for an e-business orientation session but I hadn't actually used it that year for some reason. Each student would get a photocopied "Bingo" card with boxes that had bits of information in them. "Has high-speed access @ home" (hey, this was 2001 …) … "has used a library Internet terminal in the last six months" … "has more than one e-mail address" … The objective was to circulate throughout the room and collect names of people for whom the criteria matched. The person with the most "full" card in a given period of time would "win".

I excused myself and quickly made some copies of the exercise. It got the students up on their feet, moving around and talking with each other. Soon, there was some laughter at some of the crazy bits of information on the sheet. I gave them 15 minutes, or so I told them, but really I let it go for 30 minutes. I have no idea if that was the "right" or "appropriate" thing to do. I was running mostly on instinct at that point. It certainly did change the energy in the room, in a good way.

Between hesitation at starting this class, some discussion, making copies, and then running the exercise, an hour and a half had passed of our three hour HTML class. However,  after the exercise, the students seemed able to focus on learning a few things actually related to our topic. We got about an hour's worth of actual teaching/learning in, and people seemed to leave less stressed than when they arrived. I think that was a good outcome.

I heard on the radio that a "return to normalcy" as soon as possible helps people cope with a tragedy like the VT massacre. This may be true – there is assumed safety in normalcy, I suppose. My gut instinct is that there is a need to acknowledge that lives have been changed, lost, damaged. To shift normal routine momentarily to acknowledge this. I also felt that day a need to re-create or reinforce a sense of psychological safety in the classroom, to look each person in the room in the eye and confirm, as far as one can, that this person isn't going to hurt me today. I don't have a clue how one does that when one has actually witnessed or been present at tragedy like Monday's. I expect, at a minimum, it would be harder to reach for and find the ability to trust in complete strangers.

There are heros in the VT story. I was moved by this account of one of them. Perhaps we'll hear more over the coming weeks.

My thoughts and sympathies to all affected by this terrible event.

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