Crazy story with a well-described sequence of facts, the article brought me a general understanding of how things escalated quickly. I still wonder how a person can be named as the teacher of the year and 2 days later hit a kid in the face - this doesn't look like a reaction that comes from one day to another. I'd like to know what kind of criteria made her win the title, and I'd also reach out to her students to understand better the context.

As other reviewers have pointed out, this article is balanced and presents the known facts at hand and statements from multiple individuals involved. We may never know exactly what happened behind the closed doors of Caroline Lee's room, but it sounds to me like this teacher did not like the fact that a student was raining of her "Teacher of the Year" parade by calling out her use of the N-word in class.