Posted for CSTP blogger KIM:
In one of my previous lives, I really was a Russian language prisoner-of-war interrogator. Forget everything you ever learned in the movies about interrogating POW’s; it’s really nothing like that. Interrogation involves the art and skill of reading body language and using basic psychology to get the information we need. Two “techniques” are Fear Up and Fear Down. Simply translated, this means that I 
either build up their fear or dispel it to achieve the desired effect of cooperation.
At the outset, 9th graders might seem a little different than your basic Soviet soldiers, but really, they’re all just teenagers or young adults who aren’t quite in as much control of their lives as they would like to be.
Because the word “interrogation” has negative connotations, it might seem out of place in the public school classroom. Why would there be a need to interrogate or question an adolescent?