KAUKAUNA, WI—Given pause after witnessing the consequences of their actions, members of a sixth-grade class at River View Middle School reported feeling kind of bad Wednesday after discovering how little effort it took to make their teacher, 23-year-old Kayla Martin, cry. “Oh, jeez, now I feel guilty—I realize we were being a little bit mean to her, but I had no idea she was just gonna burst into tears like that,” said student Daniel Rivera, 11, adding that he and his classmates “weren’t even laying it on all that thick” when the first-year teacher turned off all the lights, yelled at them to put their heads down on their desks, and retreated to the back of the room, where she could be heard quietly weeping. “Sure, a few of us were deliberately talking over her every time she tried to speak. And Madison and her friends kept pointing and making fun of Ms. Martin’s shoes. But she lost it in, like, half the time it used to take Mrs. Bergman to start crying. The poor young thing.” At press time, the sixth-graders confirmed feeling absolutely terrible after Ms. Martin had wordlessly pressed play on an educational film about fossils and returned to sit at her desk in the dark.

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