I put my finger across my lips and walked around the classroom to quietly signal to the kids that they needed to be quiet for the lead teacher, who’d been trying to give a lesson for the last 20 minutes. I sat at the back of the room where I could keep an eye on them. They were refusing to be quiet. “Mr. Donaldson,” the teacher said to me, “I’m going to need you to move your seat.” “You got it,” I said. I sat where she asked me to. A boy threw some chips across the room and they landed in the garbage. Another spit on a girl who was twerking whenever the teacher turned around. Another ran and slid in front of the teacher and almost took her out. “Mr. Donaldson, could you please keep a better eye on them,” she said. She asked me to sit next to a student who was farting and pelvic thrusting over by the sharpener. “Whatever you need,” I said. What kind of a world do we live in where everyone except the people misbehaving get moved around, I thought to myself. She should have thrown half the class out by now. “Mr. Donaldson, if you’re not going to control these kids, then I’m going to send you to an administrator,” she said. I’d had enough of the scapegoating. “I’ve been the only one supporting you, and the only behaved one this entire time,” I said. “Get out!” she said. Under ordinary circumstances I might have took some space. But in this instance I thought if I did that I’d only be enabling the scapegoating to continue. “No, you get out,” I said. “This is my classroom,” she said. “Get out of your classroom, then,” I said. She approached me and raised her hand as if to slap me, but I got around the back of a desk, positioning it between us. Almost instantly, the kids all sat in their seats and became unnaturally quiet. She tried to push the desk out of the way, but I held it down. When she tried to hit my hands to make me let go of the desk, I blew some air in her face. She screamed this godawful scream and fell to her knees and started crying, but when she did, she kneeled on a pencil one of the kids threw across the room, and it stuck into her knee. A part of me felt bad. “Do you want some help with that?” I said. “I could really use some help with everything,” she said. “It’s overwhelming to be in a chaotic and lawless environment like this,” I said. “It’s the end of the world,” she said. I pulled out the pencil and helped her back to her teacher’s desk where she sat and put her head between her knees. The kids silently got up and put their hands all over her to try to console her. “We’re sorry,” one kid said. “We were being horrible,” another said. “We’ll be good from now on,” one said. I asked them politely to return to their seats and wait for their teacher to come back to baseline, where we all waited for her to continue her lesson. She looked up at me. “Thank you,” she said. “It’s what I do,” I said. She retrieved a piece of candy from her desk and offered it to me as a kind of reward or peace offering. “I’m diabetic,” I said.