"The Hunger Games"-crazed teacher jailed for making her students fight one another

Post-apocalyptic meltdown - teacher jailed for taking a young adult novel a little too seriously. The Hunger Games trilogy is a young adult literary phenomenon that took the world by storm in 2008 - and the wind is still blowing strong. As of 2014 the trilogy had sold over 65 million copies and has given rise to three blockbuster movies with a fourth one on the way. The novels center around a fictional post-apocalyptic world called Panem, a volatile place where the hunger games take place. The hunger games is a competition wherein a boy and a girl (so called tributes) from the twelve district in which Panem is divided, are chosen to represent their district in a bloody fight to the death.

In Baltimore, Maryland, one avid The Hunger Games fan took it a litte too far. According to reports that became available to the public this morning, Tina May, 27, a teacher at a highschool in central Baltimore, was so enamoured with the books and the movies that she decided she wanted to apply some of its essence to her teaching.

In Febuary, May allegedly divided her class (which conveniently consisted of 24 students) into 12 districts with 2 tributes in each. Then, she brought the students to the school's gymnasium, where she had stockpiled various food items and told them that they would have to stay there overnight and fight each other for the food if they wanted to keep their grades above an F. May had set up video cameras through which she could monitor what was happening and told the students that if they didn't "get into it" she would fail them. Lastly, she locked the doors and "let the Hunger Games begin". Most of the students refused to fight, but as the night wore on, police report, some boys started to punch each other bloody. The footage from Mays cameras show a brutal scene where a boy is held down by a large gang of assailants who appear to be forcing him to lick the floor. None of the students had any contact with the outside world as May had been careful to confiscate any mobile phones the students might have had on them prior to locking them into the gym.

The courts handed down a swift sentence today. May was sentenced to 24 months in prison for her outrageously inappropriate incitement to violence and severe teacher misconduct. May did not seem repentent as her sentence was read out, but seemed to almost cherish the descriptions of the event that the prosecutor made. To discuss this story, tweet under #HungerGamesTeacher