a regret

This has been bothering me since last night, so I want to get it off my chest.

I regret that several years ago I admitted to my boss that I'd lost my temper with a verbally abusive student. I was very angry inside and I took him to the office.

Then I was grilled as if I were the guilty party.

Apparently Mr. P equated losing my temper with going absolutely freaking psycho and screaming and yelling at the miscreant.

I didn't know that my terms were so different than his. What I meant was that he made me so angry I felt like he'd gotten the best of me.

And then Mr. P went on to defend one of the school's worst-behaved, rudest, smartass students in the awful way he'd talked to me, because I essentially couldn't ignore what the boy said and it made me angry.

As I found out later that day, the boy's grandfather was great pals with my boss and that of course meant that he was a little angel to both of them. Said grandfather, after saying that the kid did nothing at all (a whole class witnessed the "nothing at all"), knelt down on the floor and said, "Let us pray..."

I kept my feelings about that baloney to myself. Unless he was praying that the jerk became a good kid and would stop being such a problem for me, I didn't want to hear that hypocritical crap. It irritated me for him to assume that I even was of the same religion as he was, and how dare he presume ANYTHING religiously on my behalf????

I don't know what particular church he went to, but it was obvious the old man thought he was better than me, and that the grandson he was raising poorly was as well.

I think it was the Church of Hypocritical BS, to be quite honest.

I'd bet good money that kid has been in and out of jail despite his grandfather's "praying". Sometimes praying isn't what you should do when you are mindfully raising a rotten kid. Sometimes a true ass whipping is what the kid really needs to straighten out. I'm sure that at some point, that boy has already gotten several from members of the general public over that mouth of his.

I did learn something from this. I learned never to trust my boss to do the correct, morally right thing when it came to someone he knew. And I also learned that if he asked me did I lose my temper, he was digging to see if he could turn it around and make the whole thing my fault somehow.

From that point on, I never said I'd lost my temper again. I didn't act any differently, because there was nothing wrong with how I was handling my classroom. But I did grow a cold, hard-plated demeanor that gave them no fuel for their lies.

I regret that I foolishly let him make me out to be the one in the wrong, when that boy cursed me in front of my class.