Teacher Charged for Operating Classroom Fight Club?!
Classroom Fight Club?!
You remember the first rule of fight club, right? You don’t talk about fight club. Of course, in this case, the first rule should have been teachers should not start a fight club in their classroom. This is one of those weird stories that makes you wonder about humanity and whether our overall intelligence might be on the decline.
Not the Teacher of the Year
The teacher in question was 23-year-old Ryan Fish, a substitute math teacher who was teaching in a Connecticut high school. This was not a one-time fight, and it was not a fight that simply got out of control and the teacher was blamed. This was ongoing, and the teacher was being investigated by the Montville Police Department for months before the arrest was made.
The teacher was running what was a fight club of sorts and he was doing so right in the classroom. There were a number of videos that were posted to sites online that showed fights that were occurring in the class of high school freshmen. The strikes that were seen in the videos are reportedly open handed, although that does not mean that they are not going to hurt and that they are not going to cause damage. Additionally, it seems that not everyone who was involved in the fights were happy about it or willing to participate, but they may have been forced to.
Additionally, it is not as if Fish had lost control of the classroom and they were doing this without his permission. In the videos, he can be seen telling the kids to move away from the door, likely so they would not be seen. He encourages the fights, and he even tells one to keep fighting, after the student had been fighting and vomited because of it.
How Did This Come to Light?
It was not videos that first brought this case to the attention of the police. Instead, a student had talked to a social worker about having been beaten while they were at the school. Fish was already gone, having been fired at this point, and that’s where the story gets even more interesting. The superintendent of the school said that they had fired Fish as soon as they found out about the fighting. However, they said that they did not tell the police about it because they thought it was an isolated incident, and they did not feel that it fell into the mandatory reporting category. Most parents likely feel quite a bit different about the school’s lack of reporting the incident.
Teacher Faces Charges
The teacher faces charges of reckless endangerment and risk of injury to a minor, and he could face time in jail. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges that have been levied against him. If he does end up going to jail, there is a chance that Fish could be introduced to a fight club that includes adults.