This week in wacky Southern public school news: A seventh-grade social studies teacher has been indicted for assault and battery after calling a student “a Jew” and dragging him under a desk.

Witnesses told police that Patricia Mulholland grabbed the kid by the collar when he got up to sharpen his pencil with the command “Come here, Jew.” The she lugged him under a table and said “This is what the Nazis do to the Jews!”

Sound like someone mixed some Percoset with her morning coffee after staying up too late on WorldNetDaily.com. But Mulholland’s lawyer claims she was just employing a creative lesson about the Holocaust.

“What was a demonstrative attempt to teach about World War II and the Holocaust has been taken to mean an anti-Semitic rant and it was nothing like that,” said her attorney, Robert Ferguson.

Hmm, noting that she was quoted as declaring what Nazis do in the present tense, I’m gonna have to go with the Percoset defense.

Police haven’t released the information on whether the student was Jewish or not; if he was, he’s going to have a helluva bar mitzvah speech.

Isn’t middle school awkward enough without your teachers going batsh*t?