> Something has to be very wrong with how a teacher has been treating her young students, for a solid majority of them to want to do serious harm to her in response to her “scolding” a single student.
I respectfully disagree. Many times when I was a kid our class would be in a state of anarchy, and many times the teacher would go running out of the clas screaming and in tears down to the principal’s office. Nothing wrong with the teacher — we were just being little rat-bags.
As I see it, this incident is merely an escalation from “the good ol’ days”: the little rat-bags have had the benefit of violent tv and video games to give them ideas that we could never have dreamed up, that’s all.
In the good ol’ days incidents like this were resolved by the vice-principal and 8 strokes of the cane for all hands on deck. It is a shame the school does not have that remedy available to them today.
To give full credit to the kids, at 8 years old somebody amongst them did some pretty careful planning. There is a leader-in-the-making there.
It’s the advance planning that makes me think there’s something wrong with the teacher. It’s easy for a group of kids to get stirred up spontaneously and go ahead and act while in their initial rush of excitement. But this involved at least an overnight break (maybe even longer, as it’s not clear when the “scolding” incident occurred). Most 8-9 year olds can’t even remember from one day to the next what they were excited about the day before. They’re also prone to forgetting to take their lunchbox or lunch money to school with them. But a majority of this class remembered and still cared enough the next morning, to bring their assigned weapons and tools for the attack. If was a parent of a child in this class (perpetrator or not), I’d be asking tough questions about the teacher.