Trying to distill the absurdity of this headline into a digestible amount of characters was a considerable challenge. It’s so ridiculous and, frankly, shameful. You literally can’t make this sh*t up.
It’s true. That headline. A teacher named Loviata Mitchell at Volcano Vista High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, brought in real, actual swords to a high school classroom in New Mexico. She implored her students to duel with them, even setting a time limit for each pair to take turns. Yes, they were swinging actual, super-sharp katana swords at each other.
It ended in tragedy, as the girl on whose behalf the lawsuit is filed suffered a severe cut to her forearm, wrist and hand that “began to bleed profusely,” resulting in chronic nerve damage and daily pain, per a CBS News report.
As innately attention-grabbing as this story is, making light of such a real-life horror show in any way would feel like trivializing a very real injury suffered by some poor teenage girl, named in the lawsuit only by N.S. initials. She thought she was innocently attending class one fateful day in May 2022, until the woman in charge of her personal safety was beyond reckless with the well-being of all her students.
The victim, who was a 16-year-old sophomore when all of this occurred, can no longer complete tasks with her dominant hand as she once did. It’s costing her future job prospects and untold amounts of money.
That’s not even to get into the sheer trauma of what transpired, and how anyone could easily get PTSD from such a scary, literal life-threatening situation. In fact, the lawsuit states that the student has, in fact, been diagnosed with PTSD. Her grandparents have noticed a distancing of their relationship to her, because she’s become “withdrawn and depressed” due to her injury.
Further details are here in this video, including footage of two students with the swords, captured just before the girl who was seriously hurt took her turn with the lethal weapon.
That teacher is seriously lucky somebody didn’t get killed. Not that the students were swinging at each other with any intent to harm. It’s just that, what kind of message does that send? What are they supposed to do? How did this teacher think any of this was OK? What was her intended “lesson” to come from such gross dereliction of duty? Baffling to say the least.
The high school, vice principal and Mitchell are named in the lawsuit, per CBS, and I hope this girl and her family get every single penny they’re entitled to. A couple other grim details from the lawsuit: Mitchell told her students that the swords were “props”, and once the girl’s injury happened, she allegedly said, “I’m in trouble!” Then, she demanded that the students who were recording sword fighting videos delete them right away.
As a result of the injury, the victim can’t prepare food, or secure zippers or buttons on her own. That gives you an idea of the nerve damage we’re talking about here — and mind you, this was after surgery. Almost needless to say, Mitchell is no longer a teacher at the school. Good riddance.
We’ll end with perhaps the most disturbing part of the incident once it was sent up the school’s chain of command: On the accident report filed by assistant principal Manuel Alzaga, it was determined that no school rules were violated, as Mitchell was attempting to teach a lesson on “metal and melding.”
Really? Wow…
