Children of the Corn?

What – the – HELL???

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Nine-year-olds plotted to tie up, hurt teacher

ATLANTA - Nine-year-olds at a school in Georgia brought a broken steak knife, handcuffs and electrical tape to school in a plot to injure their teacher, authorities said on Tuesday.

Teachers at Center Elementary School in Waycross, Georgia, uncovered the plot on Friday when a pupil reported that a child in the third grade had brought a weapon into the school.

"The plan was to handcuff the teacher, put tape over her mouth and hit her over the head with the paperweight and possibly cut her," said Lt. Duane Caswell of Waycross police, adding that some students said the knife was simply there to cut the tape.

"It was a rather elaborate scheme for children of that age," he said.

The students spent a week planning the attack and planned to carry it out on the day they were caught, Caswell said.

Nine pupils in the grade, most of whom were 9 years old, have been disciplined and some were given long-term suspensions, said Theresa Martin, spokeswoman for the Ware County school district in the southeastern part of the state.

Caswell said police were also planning to charge three of the children in the juvenile court system with conspiracy to commit aggravated assault and possession of a weapon on a school property.

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Do you remember when kids used to just plot to throw a paper airplane behind the teacher's back? Yikes.

The worst we ever did to a teacher was to rearrange the large orange and blue signs hanging in her second floor classroom windows. They originally said W E L C O M E TO R A I N I E R B E A C H, after my high school. It was supposed to be a warm welcoming to the incoming freshmen, who had no idea what hell they were about to get themselves into.

Anyway, each letter took up one window pane, and our English classroom contained the M E T O R A I N I E R portion. (The W E L C O was in a science room, and B E A C H was in Algebra.)

So we took down the signs, threw away several of them, and re-arranged the remaining 5 letters to read the following:

E A T M E

The sign hung in the windows for almost a month until the Vice Principal finally drove by that side of the building and saw it.

He was not amused.
We were.

See? Crude, but perfectly harmless. We never brought knives, handcuffs, or duct tape to school – okay, maybe we did, but it never was for the purpose of tying up and shivving a teacher.

I wish we could go back to a more innocent time, where kids came to school to learn how to read and how to do math, and not how to take hostages or how to slit throats. They'll have plenty of time to learn how to do all that (and more) in high school.

I'm waiting for someone to blame this on the media – movies, rap music, comic books, video games, you name it. You know it's coming. I mean, a room full of special ed. 9 year olds don't think up such devious plots on their own, do they?

I'm also curious how they'll punish these kids. You don't toss a bunch of 9 year olds into the pokey, and I don't think they'll get the gist of supervised probation, so about the only thing you can do is send them to their room. Or take away the sugar and caffeine for at least a month.

And maybe disconnect the video games and cable TV. Just a thought.