It's amazing what a few students will do in order not to have to learn, to come up to the standards you allude to, which, by the way, I'm all for. If they could just put that energy into behaving properly and studying, everyone would be better off. But no, they get off on another agenda, for whatever reasons. In my experience a lot of it is culture, and quite a bit of it is simply human nature, cross-cultural, and some of it is just who the heck can say. There are always problems to be dealt with. It's just about always a fight of some kind — students, parents, administration. In the US, consumerism, advertising, and entitlement don't help, that's for sure.

True self-esteem comes from accomplishment, which can't happen if you lower standards and expectations into stupid land.

Poverty may have led that child to think that violence solves problems (those suburban kids would have been horrified). But I think American culture as a whole teaches that only a loser would actually work for grades, that good grades are “deserved” because you are a person, no more, no less, rather than grades being a reflection of your mastery of the material. It's a vicious circle of feel-good “self-esteem” lessons (which have been shown now to be counterproductive) and low expectations at literally every grade level.

We don't demand much out of pupils in most schools–and we don't get much, either.

I guess you are very angry. Hard to think straight or listen at someone when you are piping mad.

What scares me are the newspaper online comments pages. OTOH, stupid drunk retired calcified Reptilians are kind of known for making cranky calls to newspapers… and now they can do it on their WebTV.

Now I know cops do wrong. But that's not the issue here. Let's try to keep it straight and not cloud and confuse things.

A while back I taught in an inner-city continuation high school. There was one other white person in the school and she was another teacher. One day a student told me that if I didn't give him at least a B in the class because he had done some work, he would meet me in the parking lot after school. This was maybe a 16 or 17 year old male. My reaction wasn't fear, it was anger. I stepped outside the classroom, not saying a word, speechless, literally shaking with rage. There was a meeting with his mother and the principal and him. I don't recall that anything happened, except I was put in the position to reprimand this kid because no one else would. I said a few words but never was he told in no uncertain terms by anyone other than me that threatening a teacher with violence if you don't get the grade you think you deserve is 100% wrong.

People, kids especially, need to learn and be taught to behave. People cannot walk around scared of each other and ready to resort to violence, regardless of what the gun manufacturers, property developers, news organizations, and movie makers have the financial interests to promote. It's called civilization, and we're nowhere without it. Period.