Yep. In a 'faith' school, at that (Roman Catholic). To top it all off, the teacher shouldn't have been there. She was semi-retired, due to retire fully later in the year after umpteen years in the profession and at that school, and had gone in on one of her days off to help her class prepare for their final GCSE exams.
By all accounts she was a good teacher who everyone liked, but someone sure as hell didn't. Why? Time will tell.
I'm willing to bet there's the usual stuff about music, video games, movies and books trotted out, and it all always ignores the elephant in the room - that
society itself needs to be looked at.
It was/is the same with football hooliganism. The argument was always that footie fans were 'animals' and didn't know how to behave, that football fanship itself was partisan by nature and the strong emotions irrationally invested in the fortunes of the club led to a tribal mindset. Which is true, but then, ultimately, that's just Nationalism on a smaller scale, and no one really bats an eyelid at strong feelings regarding nationality (though boundaries, etc, are still arbitrary; there's no physical line separating England from Scotland, for example. It's just the same dirt, stone and whatever else).
Again, the problem didn't lie in fans generally or fans of one club in particular. It became a focal point and release valve for tensions within society as a whole, and they went unaddressed. Things calmed down (though, as a long-time supporter of a local club who went to hundreds of games home and away, the risk of 'trouble' never went away; it was always there, bubbling not far under the surface), but often had little outpourings. Even then, no one saw the link between those events and what was going on within society - by and large, trouble at matches flared whenever the mood within society as a whole was dark and ugly. Racism has also flared up again, and it's being treated as a football problem (everyone branded as narrow-minded thuggish fans, regardless of individual viewpoint and ignorant of the fact that it's only ever a tiny minority of the total crowd). Society gets away scot-free again, even though the drivers for racist outpourings are evident (especially in Spain): too many people feeling too much of a pinch, desperation at their life chances dwindling away and anger at govts who seem to do nothing about it (except line their own pockets), and an apparent oversupply of cheap migrant labour who'll work longer hours for much lower pay than the indigenous population can afford to work for. (I say "apparent" because a lot of it, here at least, is media BS and scaremongering to create a false controversy. It's also being used politically in a classic case of "divide and rule" and "look what the left hand's doing. Ignore the right, nothing to see there" chicanery.)
Go back to these kids, and it's society that's to blame. They'll covet iPhones over the rights and lives of other human beings. They're focused on material things rather than what matters. That's not an argument for spiritual BS or metaphysical woo, just an observation that empty ownership and/or status symbol and wealth accumulation is prized above all else. I read a comment on a news story earlier: "Unfortunately, morality, decency, compassion and fairness don't pay the rent". So the society we have punishes positive behaviours (or virtue, if you like) and encourages immorality/amorality, indecency, indifference to others and unfairness, as these things will "pay the rent". In short, it's a supposed society that's (ironically?) chock-full of sociopaths. Which is what these kids have become.
It's not Stephen King or anyone else that's to blame for that. It's The System itself.
[/rant mode]