My Second

10:21 a.m.

Yesterday was not a great day.

Yesterday I found out that I lost a student; my second.

Monday evening, about three hours after my Sociology test, a young student crashed his motorcycle into a telephone pole out in Adams County.

During the test, he was distracted and unable to focus. For almost an hour he continually glanced around the room, played with his hair and shuffled in his chair until he finally had enough answers on the page to turn it in.

He had come to me previously asking for some assistance and I referred him to student services for tutoring and to learn better study skills but he didn't seem exactly thrilled at the idea.

He left around 3 p.m. in a huff; aggravated with himself about his performance. I asked him if he wanted to talk, but he just left and told me to "leave him alone".

When I got an email from a student, one of his friends, telling me of his death I didn't believe it. I thought that this was some kind of lame-ass attempt to cover for him if he was going to be absent from the rest of the class. Immediately I began to dig and found out that she was telling the truth.

"Stunned" was the only thing I could use to describe how I felt.

Man killed in crash on Ohio 348

OSHP seeks motorcycle crash witness

I went through the regular day on Wednesday and tried to find out more answers and alerted the University just to be sure. I tried to blog, but didn't know what to say.

On a hunch, I thought that I'd look through myspace.com to see if the student had a page and it turned out that he did.

Sean

The most odd thing was to see the number of posts on his Myspace page from his friends who were sending him a message as though he had moved away.

Academia is what I want to do with my life. I've lost two students so far. One to violence and one to an accident. I have a feeling that they will not be the only ones I will lose.