When I took the job teaching history at the local middle school, I thought it would be a fun way to earn money. I’d get to work with low-income, needy students, and talk about a subject I loved all day.

I was an idiot. By the end of the first semester, I was bored and frustrated. I begged the secretary for chalk, spent the majority of my salary on basic supplies, learned to repair broken chairs with pennies, and found that the students were more concerned about the history of Jay-Z and Beyoncé than that of Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation. Coupled with the leaking ceiling, my stress level got to the point where I was considering a change in occupation…that is, until the day the classroom catastrophe hit.

As a teacher, there’s nothing worse than having your note-taking session interrupted by two teenage boys going at each other like animals. There I was, pointing at the projector screen, delving into the topic of concentration camp life in Buchenwald, when these enormous eighth-grade boys shove their desks aside with an unholy screech and slam together in the middle of the open space. Dumbfounded, I stopped mid-sentence. They didn’t react to the cracking sound as I slammed my pointer against the floor, and the rest of the class started to form a circle around the sound of smacking flesh, encouraging their classmates to kill one another.

I rushed across the room, tripped over a broken floor tile, and stabbed the buzzer on the wall, yelling at the boys to stop fighting. (Our district policy is to call for security and not to interfere, for fear of getting “accidently” injured. This was only implemented after Mrs. Garrison was thrown from her second-story window.)

The crackly sound of the speaker came out across the classroom. “Office.”

“I need security right now. There’s a fight.”

“Oh, my. They’re on their way, Ms. Madison.”

They’re on their way took less than two minutes, but I was already across the room shoving students apart when they arrived. I understood the school’s policy, but when the blood started to flow, I stepped in. I yelled at the non-fighters to go to the hallway, and the anger on my face must have been pretty motivating, because within thirty seconds the classroom was clear except for the fighting boys. When the security guys rushed the room, my students were seated quietly on the floor in the hall, and the two fighters were slowing down in the middle of the classroom. Fights start fast, but they end slowly as the combatants wear each other down, or stop altogether when no one else is watching.

The security guards were always off-duty policemen, typically the older rotund type, so when Adonis himself rushed the room and grabbed the bigger of the two students in a full nelson, I was awestruck by his beauty and youth. I mean, seriously, other than late-night TV shows, the life of a teacher is pretty much confined to grading papers, planning papers, and delivering lessons. Especially in a district like mine.