#8: Tard likes fire

When you teach tards, you get used to hearing certain noises. Moaning, yelping, or someone's leg repeatedly hitting the desk. Usually I don't stop teaching to tell the tard to be quiet, if I did that my lessons would never end. Instead I tend to continue talking loud enough for everyone else to hear. I've learned to recognize unusual sounds above the normal din of tard mayhem.

While going over our new picture problem book with the class I started to hear an unusual "flicking" sound. I glanced around the desk area to see if anyone looks particularly suspicious. The flicking stops. As soon as I look at the book and start reading again, the flicking continues.

This is the kind of shit that you tend to recognize as trouble, so I stop the class and I ask who is making the noise. No one admits anything so I continue reading. Just then out of the corner of my eye I see an orange flash.

I quickly look over and I see Angelo stuffing a flaming piece of paper into his desk. I race over and tell him to get away from his desk. Angelo responds "Why?"

By this point there is smoke coming out of the inside of the desk, and Angelo is sitting there asking me why he should fucking leave. I grab him by the collar and pull him away from the desk. I then kick over the desk, knocking the flaming papers out of it and stamp them out.

Luckily nothing else caught fire. I ask Angelo how he set the paper on fire, his response, "It just happened."

"Accidents like this don't just happen" I respond, and he says "Must be bad paper".

It was hard for me not to laugh at this point. Angelo honestly expects me to buy the spontaneously combusting yellow school paper theory.

I have him empty his pockets and I find a lighter. After further investigation I find out that he found it on the playground. This might be true, or he might have brought it from home. Either way he won three days of out of school suspension, and the honor of having me inspect his book bag and pockets when he arrives in the morning and when he comes back from recess. Someone really needs to invent a metal-detector-like device that can scan tards for dangerous shit.