I know what you mean. I was threatened with expulsion once for having a little Swiss army knife that my mom had just brought me from Switzerland. My dad got them to back down when he found out that it doesn’t count as a weapon if the blade does not lock in place and is less than a certain length.
Why are we all ready to jump down the student’s throat about this? Teachers and administrators are people too, with the same kind of biases and prejudices. So why are we so quick to blame the student? For all we know the teacher does have a vendetta against the student.
I think the best we can say is that the student may have not been acting her age, but that doesn’t warrant a week-long suspension. Nor does “disrupting class”, unless the disruption was severe (like, say, a fistfight). Schools should just stop overreacting to this nonsense.
It’s a little beyond not acting her age. jesus, do you remember being 16? There is no way any 16-year-old would sing a songlike that, unless there was an underlying meaning. Unless, of course, she has serious developmental issues. In that case, she should not ever come back to that school.
I think yours is the most sane answer in this thread. I’m not sure why people here believe that a 16 year old girl innocently breaks into a schoolkid’s song while in the middle of an unpleasant conversation with her teacher. I’m also not sure why people don’t think that the song was meant to be anything other than a veiled threat on the teacher’s life.
I think that the 5 day suspension was a soft punishment for somebody who tries to muscle a teacher with a veiled threat.
My only curiosity is if the school has any supportive info from the girl’s classmates as to which story is correct. My guess is that they do and they made the right call.