Nikki Giovanni, who teaches poetry, said she threatened to resign if Cho was not taken out of her class. She said: "I think he liked the idea he was a scary guy. Some people like that. That is how they define themselves. Kids write about murder and suicide all the time. But there was something that made us all pay attention closely.
"Students absolutely would not come into class. They said, 'He is taking photographs of us. We don't know what he is doing. It is very strange'."
What on EARTH?? What is wrong with these teachers that they would be so SCARED of a student they would give him A grades?? This infuriates me! This guy OBVIOUSLY had some "issues", and this is how they dealt with it--pandering to him? Patronizing him? REWARDING him?
I cannot believe I heard this correctly. It seems the only ones that had a clue were his former roommates who called the police because he threatened suicide and even THAT ball got dropped by the very people who should have picked it up and ran with it! UGH.
I am just sick.
I agree. It’s so ridiculous. Red flags everywhere (a prof refuses to allow him in class, students not attending class because of his behavior, him not responding when asked direct questions by a prof, etc.). It’s been 18 years since I was in a college classroom as a student so maybe it’s really different now, just like high school classes are different in many ways. Why was he still allowed to attend classes or be privately tutored? This is college, he was an adult.
I had a roommate that was looney. Seriously looney. I spent a year living with her and it was hell. I called her mother at one point, no help there. 6 months after graduation I received a form from the federal government, phone calls and eventually one on one interviews because she applied for a job that required some kind of special security classification clearance. I thought long and hard about what I said to them, I didn’t want to be responsible for her not getting a job, she was a math wiz, but she was nuts. I reported her many times to campus security, the RA, campus Admin. but not nearly as many times others had. She was a “loner” and all that but she was nuts. She could also be violent and scared me quite a few times and I’m not easy to scare. Nothing was done about her during our college years, although the university offered to switch my room many times because they couldn’t switch her out since she wasn’t the one complaining. She didn’t act out in classes, those she attended, so there wasn’t an issue there. I can’t imagine that she would have slipped through the system back then had she behaved that way in class.
In a normal world he would have been thrown out of the school long ago but in a PC world you just cant do that . People were probably afraid of getting sued or being called RACIST if they would have tried to throw this nut case out of school.