[Editor's note: a video linked to this story contains profane language and fighting.]

Social media is flooded with confrontation videos: high school kids fighting each other, grown men beating each other up in parking lots and shopping malls, and event altercations.

What happens when the fights take over the classroom, but the combatants are a teacher and student? Students across the country want to instigate trouble with their teachers, just to catch their reactions on video and spread the shame on social media.

One specific video went viral eight years ago, and it’s been making the rounds again this past month.

On Nov. 2, 2018, at Maywood Academy High School, a traditional high school in the troubled, bankrupt, failing Los Angeles Unified School District, a teacher hit a student. 

Music teacher Marston Riley was teaching at Maywood Academy High School when a 14-year-old student became argumentative, disrespectful, and belligerent, refusing to wear his uniform, then coming back into the classroom when the teacher had told him to leave.

The child wanted to start a fight. One of the students was rolling his smartphone camera to capture the confrontation. After repeated attempts to deal with the student, Mr. Riley snapped, took a swing at the minor, and a massive brawl erupted. The fight turned the entire music room upside down as students fled for safety to avoid the fight between the enraged teacher and the insolent student.

The teacher was escorted off the property later that day, never to return.

He was later charged with misdemeanor assault, to which he pled “not guilty.”

A year and a half later, just before the federal and state governments started shutting down schools and other public spaces over the COVID-19 outbreak, Riley went public to give his side of the story.

"What they showed was me hitting the student," he said. "They didn't show anything before that.""When I got to that student, particularly, he didn't have his uniform," he said. "When I asked him for it, he became belligerent.""He hit me with a basketball, so I decided I needed to call security one more time. Once he finished talking, then I........

© Townhall