But apparently third-graders are: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23905909

This horrifying, yet fascinating little story comes from Waycross, Georgia, where a group of third graders were apparently ticked off at their teacher because she had the gall to chastise one of them for standing on a chair.

So they put together a plan to take her out of the picture, as it were. A remarkably well-thought out plan involving assignments, gear, and no doubt one of those little rappel lines so one of them could shimmy down through the laser beam security system to the teacher’s desk as they kept time to the Mission: Impossible theme song. It leaves me with more questions than answers:

Who is the kid who dreamed this up, and thought ahead well enough to assign jobs to his or her minions? I bet it was a girl. I have a seventh-grade boy who wouldn’t have considered such details as covering windows, or clean up. (Especially clean up. If my boys ever turn to crime, it will be a short-lived venture at best. Fingerprints? They’ll leave entire wallets and mapquest directions to our house, along with video cameras with time-stamped film detailing their role in the crime.)

What has happened to the fine art of tattletelling? This group sounds like it has its act together better than the Russian mafia if not one kid out of nine, in an age group that makes an art form out of ratting each other out, sang like a canary.

What kind of kid plots what appears to be a murder for a teacher who made a reasonable request for classroom safety? When I was a kid, you’d have to come home missing an eye before a parent would start to get suspicious. And even money says that, if I had managed to convince my parents that the nun had, in fact, been responsible for the missing eye, I’d get in trouble for getting a nun so pissed off that she felt eye removal was necessary. (And if you’re thinking, “Hey, that sounds like a Bill Cosby routine,” let me tell you: that bit was funny because it was true.)

Edit to add: What kind of kid? One with a brilliant future in project management, that’s what kind. This is a kid who will know what to do with a PERT chart, and God help the employee who falls asleep in one of this wiz’ staff meetings.

I’d shake my head and wonder what’s up with kids today but I have to go hide my steak knives.