What Cannot Be Predicted

You can only predict things after they have happened.
Eugene Ionesco

Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don’t know how to use their energies creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.
Anthony Burgess

Before it was about who to blame or what could have been done different, it was about how do we take care of each other.
Tim Kaine, Governor of Virginia


The tragic and senseless shootings at Virginia Tech on April 16 affected me deeply—as it did millions of others.

Words fail even the most eloquent when confronted with such a brutal, sinister act. As a teacher, what most troubled me about the Virginia Tech tragedy is that human beings were murdered while passing on or acquiring knowledge. Teaching and learning the wisdom of previous generations are hallowed rites, and that’s why the actions of Chou Seung-Hui were, in the eyes of many, sacrilegious.

In light of the eight-member panel report investigating the academic community's failure to prevent that devastating and incomprehensible event—as well as an imperfect attempt to explain why I believe an act of this nature cannot be predicted—I’d like to relate a disturbing incident that occurred in one of my classes, nearly twenty years ago.

At the time I was a doctoral student and relatively new to teaching. The happening took place in a Beginning Spanish class—a level I loved to teach. No longer do I remember the names of any of the the students (alas, with the passage of time so many pupils have gone through my classrooms that I stopped, long ago, trying to keep track), but the occurrence I’m about to recall has become—in my mind, and perhaps in the minds of a few of my former students—frozen in time.

In every one of my Beginning Spanish classes I incorporated an activity students found enjoyable: “Mostrar y decir”—Show and Tell. It was a safe activity for people new to the language that took them back to their kindergarten year, when language was miraculous and sharing with one’s peers was an innocent and happy experience. I enjoyed “Mostrar y decir” as well. In fact, many of the fascinating items students brought to share over the years remain etched in my memory.

That semester, in that particular Beginning Spanish class, there was a student who stood out from his peers: he was older than anyone else in the class—in his mid-twenties, while the others were still in their late teens—and, to put it delicately, he would’ve benefited from a course on anger management. The young man had once snapped at me when I asked him to respond to a question in Spanish. (It was a Spanish class after all, wasn’t it?) For certain, I seldom encountered that type of a behavior in college. What’s more, he also had expressed his annoyance, and rather sharply, at a couple of his classmates, snapping at them as well for reasons I can no longer recall but that surely didn’t merit that type of response.

Although his behavior troubled me, I wasn’t alarmed enough to report him to the university authorities. In all honesty, he didn’t seem to pose a physical threat to anyone.

And by mid-semester—which was the time of year that I always dusted-off “Show and Tell”—every person in the classroom, including myself, had gotten to know one another fairly well. Thus, we all knew that this student, in addition to having a hair-trigger temper, had served as a MP (Military Police officer) in the US Army.

The day that his turn came to “Show and Tell,” he walked to the front of the classroom—holding a black, medium-sized canvas bag in his hand. He stood behind the podium, placed the bag on the teacher’s desk, opened it, and pulled out a submachine gun as casually as if he were pulling out his favorite book or his most treasured compact disc. He then proceeded to tell us—in Spanish—about the item he had brought to college to share with his classmates.

I realized immediately that every single person in that room, including myself, was at his mercy. My first impulse was to rush to the front of the class, stop the presentation, and confiscate the weapon. But I also knew that as a former MP, he could neutralize me in an instant if he meant to do us harm. Besides—I said to myself in one of the tens of thousands of thoughts that flashed through my mind—if our armed forces had trusted him to keep order, who was I to question their judgment?

But, to be honest, I was terrified. I could clearly see the headlines in the paper: 20 students and teacher killed in a college Spanish class. And still today, nearly twenty years later, I can vividly recall the paralysis brought on from feeling utterly powerless.

So, instead of acting on my initial impulse to do something, I chose to remain as calm as my nerves would allow. I glanced around the room—discreetly—to see how the students were handling the situation. What I saw was reassuring: every student present was absolutely calm, as if a short-tempered former MP wielding a lethal weapon in front of a beginning Spanish class was the most natural thing in the world.

I was scared, almost out of my wits, but the students’ calmness was both soothing and contagious. Based on their reaction, I sat through the entire presentation grinning like a fool who loved having submachine guns in his classroom.

After what seemed like an eternity, the student’s presentation ended (not before he showed us how to load the clip.) He then answered a few questions (that’s how at ease the students appeared to be—they asked questions, and in SPANISH!), placed the ammunition and the submachine gun back in the canvas bag, and returned to his seat.

For the remainder of the class the minutes went by painfully slow. And when the hour finally ended, I was still a bundle of nerves. The former MP was among the first to leave the classroom. As I breathe a huge sigh of relief, and as I checked my pulse to make sure that my heart rate was returning to normal, several students approached me.

“Sr. Sirias,” they said, “Thank you for remaining so calm. We were scared to death, but when we saw how at ease you were, we knew everything would be fine.”

I accepted their compliments without mentioning that it was their calmness that kept me from storming out of the room in fear for my life.

After that experience, I developed a list of items that were forbidden to bring to class for “Show and Tell”—weapons, of course, were at the top of the list. Although I continued to include “Mostrar y decir” in my Spanish classes—and for many more years at that—I never had another troubling incident.

As the instructor of that class, I knew that the student who had brought the weapon had a problem with his temper, but it never would’ve occurred to me to ask campus security to monitor him.

Admittedly, there were numerous indications that Chou Seung-Hui posed a serious threat; but could this wretchedly misguided young man have been prevented from stockpiling weapons and later opening fire on his fellow students and on the faculty?

No one, I believe, not even the brightest professor, could’ve been that prescient to foresee what was about to happen. And even if this troubled individual had been expelled from Virginia Tech, short of locking him up in a maximum security prison before he committed any crime, he would have only gone elsewhere to satisfy his lust for inflicting pain.

And the truth is that the vast majority of us could never imagine—even in our worst nightmares—that anyone would be capable of carrying out such a horrendous act. And the thought that this crime was largely unimaginable gives me a small measure of comfort; and that’s precisely why it’s impossible to predict abominable acts such as the one that took place that heartbreaking April morning at Virginia Tech.