(Malatov) Cocktail Dress

Three weekends ago a couple of students unsuccessfully tried to burn down our school building. The following weekend they tried again and were caught by police. What brings students to the point where they want to destroy an institution that supposedly exists for their benefit? This seems to be an extreme example of what teachers see almost every day: that students--the very people for whom we become teachers--view us as the enemy. Is the student-teacher relationship necessarily adversarial? One would hope not, but I think most of us can also remember times during adolescence when we viewed our parents as adversaries. So perhaps that adversarial mindset is an organic part of an adult-teenager relationship in which there is a power dynamic.