The schools have indeed gone mad!
WHEN I had my daughters in a public elementary school the other year (note that it's PAST tense), I received a call from the principle letting me know my 7 year old had threatened the teacher. The conversation went something like this.
"This is XXXXX from XXXXX Elementary.
"Sir, is there a problem, what's wrong?"
"Well, I'm calling you about your daughter, XXXX."
"Oh my goodness, is she ok?"
"It's not that, it's something she did. "
"What in the world did she do?"
"She threatened a teacher!"
I tried to stifle a laugh. My daughter was not the type of child to threaten anyone, and had never been in trouble. I thought perhaps he called the wrong parent.
"Sir, are you sure you're calling the right person? How do you spell her last name?"
"Yep, it's the right person. We need to talk about this."
"Ok, what exactly did she say? "
"She told the teacher, er, um...."
At this point in time I was panicking. What could she have said that was so bad he was hestitant to repeat it. A moment later I found out he was hestitant to repeat it because it was STUPID!
"She ummm, told Mrs. XXXX that if she asked her about her library book one more time she was going to move to Kentucky".
"And?"
"Well, that's it. "
"And the teacher felt THREATENED by my daughter saying she would move to Kentucky?"
"Well, yeah"
I explained to him that we have a family joke about an (non existant in real life) Uncle Clem who lives in Kentucky. He's illiterate, and if we lose a library book we blame it on him, but he's still not in trouble because he only took it or we sent it to him because he wanted to learn how to read. That we say one day we're gonna pack up the (again non existant) pick up truck and move out there where we'll pick up all our lost books.
I still laugh about it though. You KNOW you live in paranoid times when you get phone calls like this!
Chrys