Recently, a friend commented, regarding the theater shooting incident in Colorado
I just heard a news item that is one of the most appalling things I’ve ever heard.
James Holmes wrote his plan for the attack in a notebook and mailed it to a psychiatrist at the University of Colorado. The package sat unopened in the mail room for a week before the attack.
It still hadn’t been delivered and was only found because there was a search for a second package that the psychiatrist was expecting that wasn’t delivered.
How deep are the pockets of the University of Colorado?
It has since been reported that the notebook was in transit in the U. S. Mail, not in the University of Colorado mailroom and had not been delivered when the shootings occurred. We will probably learn more about this as events leading up to the shooting are analyzed and reported.
When something unfortunate happens, particularly if it is on a large scale, we want to attribute blame: “Someone is responsible for this, and by golly, they ought to be held to account!” In this case, some lowly clerk in the mail room is off the hook.
But this business got me thinking about the notebook itself. Was this something that Holmes sent as a cry for help – stop me before I do this terrible thing. Or was he setting the stage for a spectacular suicide by cop? Was this something the psychiatrist had requested Holmes to do? Therapeutic journaling has its adherents in some clinical circles. What would/should the psychiatrist have done with the journal had he received it in time to do something?
Unfortunately, one often does not know what is really important until afterword.
And that got me to thinking about how this business might translate to the classroom. More formerly than currently, English teachers would require their students to keep a journal with a minimum number of entries weekly. The rationale is that nothing improves a student’s writing like writing – the more the better. Ideally, a student should be writing hundreds of words daily, on a constant, on-going basis. Usually, the topics for entries are open, pretty much left to the student. If he can write on what his interests and concerns lead him to, he is more likely to write. The goal here is fluency.
The problem is that when a teacher assigns lots of writing, he is assigning himself lots of paper grading. There are practical limits to the size of a paper-load. The advantage of a journal is that it gives the teacher a hedge. When the journals are submitted for evaluation, they are seldom read in their entirety. The teacher will evaluate how faithfully the student has been keeping it and will read parts selectively, usually more or less at random. Usually, the teacher is up front about this, that they will not read every word, but the student will not know in advance which entries will be read and which will not. Often, to encourage students to write more, teachers promise confidentiality, which is a real ethical can of worms. The upside is that students write a lot, but the teacher’s paper load remains manageable. I did this in various forms, on and off, over the years. Mostly off, for several reasons. There is a down side.
Some years ago, as student in Meridian committed suicide. The parents contended that the suicide was preventable and the school had it within its power to prevent. The student’s English teacher required a journal. The parents’ contention was that a thorough reading of the journal revealed suicidal ideation. Had the English teacher read the journal attentively and in its entirety, as the parents maintained she was obligated to have done, she would have been alerted to the situation and could have alerted the parents, her superiors, and other appropriate authorities.
They sued the district as a whole and the teacher personally for educational malpractice, dereliction, or whatever they called it. It was in and out of the news for years and finally faded. Eventually, as I recall, the court found for the teacher.
Still, ethical questions remain. Behaviorist therapeutic theories generally hold that expression of ideation reinforces that ideation. What are a teacher’s ethical obligations regarding the writing he assigns and/or receives?
Obviously, unstructured, open-topic journals as a teaching strategy became notably less popular after that, at least around here. Ideally, all students’ writing should be read attentively as soon as received. There are practical limitations, of course, but they haunt us.
“A mote it is, to trouble the mind’s eye,” as the troubled Prince once said.