23 Year Old Substitute Teacher Arrested For Running A Fight Club In His Classroom
The Bulletin – Ryan Fish, 23, of Bozrah, was fired by Montville High School in October and was then arrested on April 12 on several charges, the Norwich Bulletin reports. He was charged with two counts of risk of injury to a minor, which is a felony. He was also charged with four counts of second-degree reckless endangerment and second-degree breach of peace, all misdemeanors.
Fish, a math teacher, was confronted about the fights and told administrators “boys will be boys,” before his firing. According to police, the students in the fights seemed to be “unevenly matched,” and one student who was “much smaller” than his opponent could be seen “retreating” throughout the fight, and showed “real and identifiable signs” of being traumatized by it. Fish admitted to encouraging the “slap fights,” but told police it was just “horse play,” when interviewed, according to court documents.
The first rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club. Third rule of Fight Club: you choose a more discrete location than a high school classroom where you have teenagers beat the absolute fuck out of each other while recording all of it live and uploading it to their Snapchats and Instagrams and social media platforms that people above age 17 haven’t even heard of yet. Big time breach in protocol by Mr. Fish.
A 16-year-old student involved can be seen dry-heaving and gagging over a garbage can in one video, police said. That student later told police he considered Fish a “mentor.”
Students said Fish tried to connect with them as a peer by allowing them to draw crude pictures on a board, admitting to smoking marijuana and passing on his social media information.
When interviewed by police, Fish at first characterized the incidents, which began in September, as “horse play,” and admitted to encouraging the fights.
“The truth is, I’m an idiot and wanted to befriend them,” Fish told detectives, according to the warrant. “I’m immature.”
Now this I can at least understand. Francis said something like this in his blog about how he used to be a tutor. How it was important to bend the rules a little bit in order to befriend his students so that they would be more open to actually doing work and learning later on. Of course he was talking about playing Fifa for an hour not squaring up a 5’10 200 pound 16 year old against the class dweeb and refereeing while they whooped the shit out of each other. But the principle is the same. Fish was 23 years old and looked like a teenager himself, rolling up into a class of mean high schoolers and expected to be an authority figure. You know how fucking intimidating high schoolers are? I literally cross the street if I see a pack of more than 4 high school kids out on their lunch break because I’m scared they’re going to hang me from a fencepost by my underpants.
He also allowed students to draw pictures on the board multiple times, usually depicting penises, including one drawing of Fish and another teacher where “one was giving the other a blow job,” according to court documents. Fish also wrote his Snapchat username on the board and “told us we could add him and that it was OK for us to be friends because he was just a sub,” according to court documents.
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I mean that’s also true. He’s just a sub. A substitute teacher hasn’t been respected since the invention of substitute teaching. Fish realized the uphill battle was too steep and just went for the full on friend card. Add me on The Snap, fellow kids. I know you don’t care about coefficients and common denominators – you care about fighting each other and getting favorites and retweets on it.
But that’s just kids these days. I see it, Mr. Fish saw it. I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables – slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war… Our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won’t. We’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.