"The trouble began" the morning after the election, when the principal of West High emailed the teachers: "Please be positive and strong and teach the heck out of our kids today."

That's from paragraphs 17 and 18 of a NYT article, featured on the front page, titled "At Iowa High School, Election Results Kindle Tensions and Protests."

The first 16 paragraphs are about election-related speech at the Iowa high school. A 15-year-old girl who wears a hijab says she was bumped into and told "Go back home" by "a boy she barely knew." (Near the bottom of the article, we learn the boy says he didn't say that.) Another girl says she saw students chanting "Trump" when they walked by black students. And 2 girls who identify as conservative reported that other students were looking at them the wrong way and not treating them as equals.

Did the principal's email cause the problem? I've read the rest of the article, and I don't see the basis for the insinuation that teachers reacted to the principal with some sort of outrage at the instruction to "be positive." We hear of 2 teachers who talked to each other about the "Go back home" incident, wondering what they could do.

The Friday after Election Day and again the following Tuesday, students walked out of class in protest. The Friday protest is described in the NYT as marching and sign-carrying. The second one is described as sitting on the floor at the entrance of the school and wearing duct tape over their mouths.

It's hard to figure out what to think when the story is presented in an impressionistic fashion like this. The writer, Julie Bosman, seems, as one might expect, sympathetic with the protesting students and the distraught teachers. There are incidents that are reported as reports. We don't know if they really happened or happened exactly as reported. 2 students bumped into each other. Was that an accident, followed by some loose talk? Or was it deliberate harassment and part of a pattern? Protests ensued, but was it because of what students thought happened in that incident or was it because many of the students wanted to protest the election?

This feels like another one of the post-election stories about how the losing side is very emotional and justified in its anguish and the winning side is taking advantage in an evil way. That's the template. So I'm wary of the material that's being scraped together to fit the template.

That reminds me, I wanted to write a post about the "fake news" problem.