Student threatens teacher

Catching up from this past week's stories, there's this one from the AJC. In summary, a high school girl sang a line to the tune "On Top of Old Smokey" that included "... I shot my poor teacher with a .44 slug." This was in a class where the student had just received a bad grade with a teacher that she had conflicted with before. Now, I'm more than willing to throw copious quantities of grief at public school officials when they apply this "zero tolerance" stuff (used way too often), but I'm not so sure the criticism of the school is what is warranted in this case.

For example, had somebody at my work sang this little diddy, I'd probably think nothing of it; to my knowledge, there hasn't been a rise in the shooting of (almost) engineers. However, there has been a problem with this in the schools; too many to list, but you know the big ones. I think they did the right thing, here. From the teacher's perspective, here's a student whom he had had problems with in the past being a little smart alleck and singing about killing a teacher. From what I've gathered about her (the student) she's a bossy little brat who's now sounding her whining horn (with the help of the local media). She and her mom just need to view this as a learning experience (read: you don't sing songs about killing people, period) and move on.