Sophia Waugh: School Days Death threats in the classroom

We are all meant to love a bit of technology. It’s all part of the modern world, of course, and makes everything so much easier. In theory.

I have seen many technological changes that have indeed made my working day easier: online registers, setting homework online and even, I suppose (although I hated it) teaching online. Since GCSEs no longer involve coursework, the big threat of the online world to fair results has been removed. We should be safe.

This is not the case. A few years ago, a boy made a website called I Love Miss Waugh, using a photograph of me from the internet. It was supposed to be my website, which made it oddly named. It was more than a little spooky. Another child came to me and told me about this site. Parents were informed, advice given about ‘appropriate’ behaviour, and the website taken down. That, it seemed, was that. However, things have now taken a nasty turn – it is a surprise it has not happened before. One of the features on the site we use to set homework also has a function whereby the children can message the teachers.

So far, this has been entirely useful and entirely innocuous. Children send messages about homework. I’ve even had children message me asking me for advice about what to read next.

Last weekend, though, two children who were presumably bored by the Coronation and other spring pleasures laid on for their pleasure (the rain was falling like a monsoon, to be fair) decided to spend their weekend messaging teachers.

These messages were unbelievable in their nastiness. They were then photographed and shared more widely on other social media. They ranged from various curses and obscenities to threats to kill. They were wide-ranging in their attacks (I did not receive any myself and I’m not sure if that is a compliment or otherwise) and vicious in their language. Many of the teachers who received them were genuinely shaken by the vitriol and the deadly details of the threats.

Some of those who received death threats reported them to the police, but nothing much seems to be happening.

The school disabled the messaging part of the app – but what about the miscreants? They both claim their accounts were hacked and, with a lack of evidence to the contrary, they were just given a day’s internal seclusion.

Not much for something that has become the talk of the school and shocked staff and students alike.

The real problem lies deeper than this one situation. It suggests an underlying, unrepentant nastiness which can be carelessly fuelled through the easy access to social media from brains too young, and possibly too stupid, to understand exactly what they are doing.

None of us really believes that either of the students really intends to bring a weapon into school and attack teachers – we’re not in America, after all. But those of us who were targeted will not be able to help looking over their shoulders for a while.

Meanwhile, maybe we should all step back from the technology.

Quite Interesting Things about … lunch

Nobody knows where the word lunch came from.

Dr Johnson’s dictionary de ned lunch as ‘as much food as one’s hand can hold’.

Milton Friedman’s book of essays on public policy There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (1975) won the Nobel Economics prize in 1976.

The free lunch was made illegal in New York in 1897.

To help local restaurants, Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies are banned from providing free lunches at their HQs.

The average FTSE 100 CEO makes more money by Wednesday lunchtime each week than the average worker earns in a year.

The French work a 35-hour week and nish their tasks by Thursday lunchtime.

A survey of 2,000 Britons in 2017 found that 77 per cent of them had exactly the same thing for lunch every day.

The most popular lunch in Britain is a ham sandwich.

During the Second World husband of Nelson’s mistress Emma Hamilton, liked to go up to the rim of the crater of Vesuvius, where he picnicked naked, lunching on pigeon roasted on molten lava.

War, Churchill often breakfasted in bed and sometimes stayed there till lunchtime with a secretary typing at his bedside.

JFK ate his lunch in bed and then slept for one to two hours in the afternoon, with Jackie. He was not to be disturbed for any reason.

Ronald Reagan liked to say he never drank co ee at lunch because it kept him awake for the afternoon.

Theodore Roosevelt’s favourite lunch on a long hunting trip was elk tongues.

The rst airline passenger lunch was served in 1919.

In 2018, a man paid $3.3 million at auction to have lunch with Warren Bu ett.

The average British lunch lasts 17 minutes.

JOHN LLOYD

222 QI Answers to Your Quite Ingenious Questions is out now

Ham fans: the British

Sir William Hamilton (1730-1803), British Ambassador to Naples and

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