Virginia students return to classes
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
CRYING, hugging, many still clearly shaken, thousands of Virginia Tech students were heading back to classes yesterday one week after a disturbed classmate killed 32 in the country's worst-ever mass shooting.
Virtually empty since classes were cancelled after Cho Seung-hui blasted his way through a dormitory and a classroom building on April 16, the campus in this rural southern Virginia town filled up late last Sunday as students, many with their parents, returned to the university.
First-year student Adriana Gonzalez said she was unnerved by the prospect of resuming class, after having been locked down in her classroom building one week earlier as Cho blasted his way through Norris Hall just next door before killing himself.
"Tomorrow I have to take the same route as last Monday" to class, Gonzalez said shortly after driving back from her home in Alexandria, Virginia near Washington.
David Anderson, a graduate student from Massachusetts, said he welcomed the occasion to get back to work and get the tragedy out of his mind.
"It's been real hard getting motivated this week," he said.
After a week of some of the most intense media attention ever seen in the United States, the university banned reporters and television cameras from classrooms yesterday, aiming to let the students and professors begin to deal with the massacre away from scrutiny.
Last Sunday under warm, sunny skies at the drillfield at the center of campus, hundreds of students, parents and alumni lined up to pay their respects to the dead, represented by a semicircle of 33 stones — including one for Cho — piled high with flowers, candles, American flags and mementos from softballs brought by a visiting team to stuffed animals.
Despite the huge crowd there was only a respectful murmur, and occasional sobs, across the sprawling green-carpeted commons, which students say is normally lively and noisy when the weather is good.AFP
Virtually empty since classes were cancelled after Cho Seung-hui blasted his way through a dormitory and a classroom building on April 16, the campus in this rural southern Virginia town filled up late last Sunday as students, many with their parents, returned to the university.
First-year student Adriana Gonzalez said she was unnerved by the prospect of resuming class, after having been locked down in her classroom building one week earlier as Cho blasted his way through Norris Hall just next door before killing himself.
"Tomorrow I have to take the same route as last Monday" to class, Gonzalez said shortly after driving back from her home in Alexandria, Virginia near Washington.
David Anderson, a graduate student from Massachusetts, said he welcomed the occasion to get back to work and get the tragedy out of his mind.
"It's been real hard getting motivated this week," he said.
After a week of some of the most intense media attention ever seen in the United States, the university banned reporters and television cameras from classrooms yesterday, aiming to let the students and professors begin to deal with the massacre away from scrutiny.
Last Sunday under warm, sunny skies at the drillfield at the center of campus, hundreds of students, parents and alumni lined up to pay their respects to the dead, represented by a semicircle of 33 stones — including one for Cho — piled high with flowers, candles, American flags and mementos from softballs brought by a visiting team to stuffed animals.
Despite the huge crowd there was only a respectful murmur, and occasional sobs, across the sprawling green-carpeted commons, which students say is normally lively and noisy when the weather is good.AFP
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