This happened about 20 years ago, I was retelling the story to a friend recently and to my surprise, she thought that I was mean and that I ruined that woman's career "for no good reason". I strongly believe I was in the right, so let me know what you think.

In France, where I grew up, high schools have "pawns", usually college students or young adults, often ones who are preparing for a career in education as teachers themselves. They are in charge of keeping order among the kids, watching over study hall, prepping classrooms before the teachers come in, cleaning the floors, etc. They have the power to give detentions. One new pawn was a young woman who introduced herself as a "future history-geography teacher". She was probably not an evil person, but clearly she had the idea that she needed to "make herself respected" so she went HARD, day one, on being a hardass with us kids. Normally, new pawns being hired is not an event, but the whole student body knew about her within hours of her first day because she was chain-punishing kids with detentions for literally any excuse. Leaning on the wall? Detention. Kissing your girlfriend during recess? Detention. Being too loud? Detention. Being too quiet? Believe it or not, also detention.

She was in charge of keeping an eye over the cafeteria during lunch and cleaning the floor. I know about the latter because she had the brilliant idea to dole out "cleaning duty" punishment to the kids who "misbehaved" during lunch, aka anyone making a peep where she could hear it. My "crime" was that I was a little autistic kid stimming and she punished me for "fidgeting too much." She kept a dozen of us in the cafeteria after lunch, she said something like "Instead of me cleaning the floors, you will be sweeping and moping, that will teach you to behave" and forced the other punished kids to clean.

I, on the other hand, was of that rare breed that read the school's rulebook to the point of knowing it by heart. I pulled the book out of my bag and pointed to her the section about "physical punishments" which did include "making the student clean school property"... and clarified that ONLY the school administration can dole it out (NOT PAWNS, not even teachers), that it requires a disciplinary council to be called and vote on this punishment at a 2/3rd majority, and a disciplinary council requires that a ministry official come down from Paris to personally attend it - alongside the school principal and elected representatives of both parent and student unions. Not a punishment a random pawn can give to a dozen kids on a whim.

She SCREAMED at me to shut up and comply OR ELSE, I SCREAMED back at her that she is getting fired for committing an unforgivable fault and that she'd be lucky to only be fired and not be charged with some sort of child abuse or abuse of power crime. She threatened to walk me to the principal's office, I told her to not bother because I was already on my way there to formally report her behavior. We angrily powerwalked to the principal's office together. The principal immediately balked when hearing what she did - he first tried to convince me to keep quiet and that he would deal with it personally without needing any drama, and when I let him know that I had already yelled the exact content of the rulebook at her in full view of the dozen punished kids, the principal gave up on trying to burying the story. He told me to go back to the cafeteria and instruct the punished kids to stop cleaning and resume their days. I left him and the pawn in that room, and I am certain he screamed at her as I was leaving.

I did not witness it myself, but rumors said that afterwards, she was seen ugly-crying in her car before driving off mid-day on her first day of work. She was never seen again. Usually, when a pawn was let go, the students were notified about it, but not a word about her - the administration treated her as if she'd never been there in the first place.

When telling that story, I expected my friend to say "wow that woman was terrible" but instead her reaction was "so you ruined her life instead of shutting up and sweeping the floor for half an hour? And you expect me to cheer on you being so cruel to her? Teaching was her passion, do you think any school hired her after this?!" Not gonna lie, I still strongly believe the pawn was in the wrong and that she brought the consequences down on herself, my only role in it was that I refused to comply with an unfair punishment and I brought the case to the principal. AITAH?