commentary on story (part 3)

I reported Duangchay to the Dean for two reasons: First, I was afraid. Zhan Yin, a 27-year-old graduate student in the biological sciences (just like Duangchay, as I later found out), had killed another Purdue doctoral student and her sister with a small hammer after a traffic dispute three months before my incident with Duangchay. And secondly, I wanted to turn my exchange with Duangchay into a teachable moment. My students were all writing instructors who had dealt with less severe instances of this same occurrence and were unsure of how to handle it. By addressing the situation in a visible, concrete way, I hoped to provide these instructors with strategies for confronting this issue.

But what exactly was “this issue”? At first, I interpreted my experience with Duangchay as an authority problem. But that explanation proved unsatisfactory—or, at the very least, incomplete—in that I could not imagine the same type of exchange happening in a face-to-face classroom. It would be ridiculous for a student to interrupt a f2f class and insist on using the blackboard during a lesson:

“Could you pass me the chalk? I’ve just got to map this out. Be done in a sec.”

Duangchay’s letter of apology got me thinking along more fecund lines.