Are you panicking just from the blog title?
Great.
It's an innocuous, harmless tale from school, from the days after Three Mile Island (TMI) and before Chernobyl, when American schools still had their students build models of the great inventions of humanity. Nuclear power plants we considered one such innovation.
The students built their little power plants. Let's spell out what they were made off, gotta these days. The only ingredients were cardboard, wood, paper, glue and paint as desired. The most intricate, most expansive, painstakingly to-scale model of the more than 20 students was done by a girl. The teacher gave her a D minus.
Why?
She had added card-size "posters" that listed the issues and dangers of nuclear power, which were more in the public eye after TMI but had not yet changed the attitudes of whole nations.
Her parents talked to the principal, and the grade was revised to C.
The same student made another trip to the principal as a result of the dying kitten incident. A badly burnt, dying kitten on the way to school was the topic of the day, and the boy behind her surreptitiously started to make very nasty comments about the dying kitten in class. Whereupon she turned around and punched him. To her surprise, it was a perfect hit, right on the nose, causing some bleeding.
The principal calmly and firmly explained this behavior was unacceptable. When he saw she had understood, he added 'I would probably have done the same. Just don't do it in class, wait until after school'.
Some days, she wonders about the principal from way back when.
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