Evil is coming in smaller and smaller packages.

I’ve learned from this blog that children are capable of conceiving a murder plot — a DETAILED one at that — against their teachers:

Georgia 3rd-graders plotted attack on teacher, brought knife, handcuffs to school

Yep, that’s the exact article headline. We’re talking about 8-10-year-olds, ladies and gentlemen. Third graders. Yes, younger than the stars of Jeff Foxworthy’s quiz show that makes American adults look like complete imbeciles.

I suppose I’m alarmed because I’m a teacher myself, and I teach older kids (they’re actually practically adults, and are capable of so much more, probably for even less an insult than being scolded for standing on chairs). Just the thought that students could actually hatch a murder plot — thinking it is one thing, actually bringing the weapons to school and assigning roles so that the intricate tasks of distraction and clean up are actually touched on (!) is another. (The plan was thankfully stalled by a tattletale who squealed that one of her classmates had a knife is his backpack — well, sometimes you have to be thankful for those people, though they can grow up to be gossip mongers.)

Good Lord — what IS the world coming to? Can you picture the planning, the going over all of the details, that went through in this plan? Thankfully it remained a plan, but what if it hadn’t?

Animation was blamed. One of the officials said that the children (there were about nine involved) probably thought the whole situation were a cartoon — those who were killed in one episode were revived in the next, so eventually the teacher they were supposed to have killed would be okay eventually.

But really — does child psychology STILL work that way?

*breathe* OK, OK, I’m not hyperventilating.

Though I actually had a similar incident at the university where I teach. One of the college students in danger of failing his major subject (though not mine, thank goodness) oh-so-innocently asked another teacher, within the earshot of the teacher whom he was trying to bargain to get his grades up and consequently failing in his attempts, if he (the student) could bring a gun to school.

I was like — what the? That didn’t sound right. I wanted to alert the security guards of this threat. Yes, I was convinced it was a barely concealed threat — what’s the point of letting him overhear, deliberately, his cause of action to bring a weapon to school if it meant nothing? The kid wasn’t making small talk, and I knew it. But the other teacher (on whose hands the offending student’s fate rested) didn’t think so; he felt it was just masculine aggressive talk — in other words, the student was just bluffing and was trying to scare him. Well, maybe, since thank the Lord the student never carried out his threat (though I think he failed his course), but at that moment I wasn’t about to take chances. The point was, you can never tell when it’s just going to be “just talk” or you’re going to construe that as a real threat to be carried out. With all the reports about shootouts in campuses (remember the Virginia Tech and the Columbine Massacre), it was better to be safe than sorry.

Maybe that’s the saddest thing of all. We don’t know what’s going on in kids’ heads anymore. We don’t know who our kids are anymore; they’ve succumbed to the distorted exposure of violence and video games and TV shows who justify murder that they could never appreciate the entire wrongfulness of their actions — least of all their thoughts.