Taking a moment to don my teacher hat, I wonder if there is a fundamentally different way of looking at it than the perception that Sophia is inherently mean-spirited, or in the terms of nature vs nurture.
In classrooms I very often end up with situations where I have bad students, people who act up and just make it impossible for anything to get done. Working at the same school as I have been in my role as a substitute, I have seen these same students in multiple different settings. And one thing that I've seen more than once is that some students are only problems in relation to other students.
For an example, Student A and I have had some very interesting conversations, he's a bit of an absurdist philosophically, and challenges any position for value, in a search for value. Alone, he isn't much of a problem. He can actually (when there is no work to do) be a rather interesting person to talk to.
Student B is a pain in the neck. He is a guy who wants to be the class clown, everything has to be a joke, and he'll make a quippy remark about anything. But, if he is by himself, he'll limit himself to a snide remark or two, and then just slide into quietly doing the work and not causing problems.
The Problems start when you have Student A and Student B, and the worse case was when I had Students A, B, C and D, because they all fed off each other. A snide remark will get complimented, another student will riff off it, a third will laugh and that just encourages the next student to try and out do them, and they are this little pod that just generates trouble and makes getting anything done impossible, because they feed off each other and reinforce each other.
So, does Sophia have a warped world-view? Absolutely. But also Emma was trying too hard and pushing to prove to herself that she wasn't a victim, and Madison was a type of person to whom everything seems to have been juvenile and funny. Putting all three of them together, you could see Sophia giving them the sense of "us vs them, and we hurt them so they don't hurt us", Madison offering a childish suggestion, and then Emma pushing it to 12 because she wants to prove how hard she is and impress Sophia, and they just feed off each other's actions.
But change the dynamic, by adding Taylor and removing the focus of their actions... and things will turn out way differently. Because truly, adding or removing a single person to a group can literally change EVERYTHING. A single missing student can change the entire classroom dynamic in a moment.
So, maybe that is the way to look at it. More like chemistry and catalysts than nature vs nurture?
