For a high school drafting teacher to ask students to write an essay on something wholly unrelated to their class, he’d need one heck of a topic to keep students interested. Particularly if the essay isn’t even a formal assignment. Michael Maxwell had such a topic. He asked students to give him their best fiction accounts of who they’d like to kill and how they’d do it.

Though it may well be the stuff of daydreams to some, tapping the muse for the perfect murder was not an activity well received by the administration of the St. Joseph, Missouri, Central High School.

“He’s an exemplary person,” principal Barton Albright said of Maxwell. “This is very unlike him.” Albright learned of the writing assignment when a parent of one of Maxwell’s students, too weak to appreciate the topic, called to complain.

Maxwell says the assignment was “a horrible mistake.” He has disciplined by way of a one-week’s suspension without pay and six months of probation. Some of his students, however, might’ve come up with a better punishment.

» Scott Saxon