Temper temper

Teaching teaches you about yourself.

I required that all my students turn off their cell phones while in my class. I wasn’t a stickler on shirt tails and tardies. Shoot, I threw a plastic spoon at Carmen, a freshman girl, and hit her between the eyes. I’d asked her to stop talking several times. Despite my own flagrant disregard for decorum, I didn’t think my phone rule was too much to ask. If a student’s phone went off during class, I confiscated it, and the perpetrator had to wait until after school to get it back.

You can imagine how my jaw dropped when during the Anglo-Saxon literature unit test, one of my juniors, Tyne Brewer, raised his hand and said, “Mr. Church, I’m getting a call and it’s a long distance number that I don’t recognize and I’d like to take it.”

Five minutes later, after I finished sharing several “thoughts” with Tyne and the rest of my 5th period class, all the color had drained from his face and I had gained valuable insight into Mr. Austin L. Church, High School English Teacher:

I had a temper.

Some people spend years and thousands of dollars on therapists to learn such things.

I, however, got paid to discover these manifestations of my immaturity. Genius.

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