This morning, Ms. Sholtes tricked her class into thinking staff placed a new rule forcing students to only read non-fiction books. She took away all fiction books from students. Ms. Sholtes claims the school board did this “to enforce the reading of nonfiction books so students pay attention to real events rather than reading about fantasy worlds and futuristic societies.”

Ms. Sholtes told her class this morning and chaos erupted. Many students complained saying, “nonfiction is boring”, and “ I like this book!”. Other students could see right through the lie. For five minutes, the class yelled at her, shouting things like, “You’re lying!”, “Is this real?”, “I don’t want to give you my book!”, and “Show us the email!”. Ms. Sholtes told her angry students to write an article about what just happened. While writing the articles, many students kept asking her if it was real. Eventually, she broke. She told the class the truth and told them to continue writing the article.

By the end of the hour there were many different opinions about the lie. Being lied to made many students extremely upset. Some say that they no longer trust Ms. Sholtes. On the other hand, Ms. Sholtes explains that she did this to give her students an example of what being a journalist is like, and a topic to write about.  Do you agree with Ms. Sholtes, or the upset students?