A Bronx school teacher became so frustrated with a 7th grader who answered a question out of turn that she allegedly walloped him in the head with a plastic milk crate, causing him to bleed profusely while horrified classmates looked on.
Jaiquan Maples, an honor-roll student at the Urban Assembly Bronx Academy of Letters, was so eager to answer a question posed by his English teacher on September 18th that he interrupted another student to do so. While it's not the greatest example of phlegmatic Victorian etiquette, it hardly justified what happened next. "She, with a mad face, went to the bookshelf where we hand in our homework and grabbed the crate and came furious with a mad face, walking really fast, and hit me in my head with it," Maples recounted for NBC New York.
But the unnamed teacher is not totally without a heart: She procured a single tissue with which Maples could mop the blood pouring from his skull, and relented to let him use the bathroom after only 10 minutes of forcing him to remain seated in class. Anyway, it was just a joke, can't everyone just lighten the fuck up for a second?
"She sat me down and talked to me and said that she was being playful with me and it was by accident, and that she didn't intend to hurt me," Maples said. He never went to the nurse's office or spoke with the principal about the incident.
Maples' mother, Jennifer Vasquez, was less amused. She took her son to the emergency room, and though he didn't require stitches, doctors are reportedly "monitoring" him. Weeks later, Vasquez is still applying a healing ointment to her child's battered cranium.
A Department of Education spokesperson tells us that the school's principal immediately notified authorities, and that the matter is under investigation. Maples, for his part, would like to switch schools.
