Student in Class by Tulane Public Relations (cc by)
In a thread about apologizing to grade school teachers many years after the fact, member Navelgazer tells the story of an impromptu popularity contest that had the potential to hurt the least popular kids, but thanks to their amazing teacher, it got turned around:
Anyway, the next day, the last day, he's giving us the speech about having never taught a class nearly as gifted as this one, the speech every teacher gives, but this time it's utterly 100% sincere, and he's near tears, and there's just good feelings going all around, which must be how we convinced him to let us do the thought experiment with our classmates.
I don't know at what point it dawned on him just how cruelly awful an idea that was, but by then we had control over the classroom and there was seemingly nothing he could do about it.