The quotations may not be totally accurate but the tone and spirit are:

Yesterday I was yelling at one of my classes for being inattentive, and broke out one of the old standards: “If you guys get bad grades, that’s fine by me because I already passed APUSH.” Granted, it wasn’t called APUSH back then, it was APAH, but that’s not the point.

One of the little angels made the mistake of saying what he was thinking: “Yeah, but did you get an IB diploma?” If you know IB kids, you already know the tone he used. He probably didn’t mean to use that tone, but it got away from him too fast.

The good news is I managed to respond without vaporizing his face with my heat vision. It was something along these lines:

“No, I didn’t get an IB diploma. But my diploma– the one I earned from Stanton at age 16 after getting fives on all my AP exams except Portfolio– got me into an out-of-state school absolutely free of charge and helped me graduate with honors at 20 with zero debt. So I’m not too broken up about not doing IB.”

Some of the kids applauded, probably sarcastically. I wasn’t in the mood and told them to shut up. I am very proud of my high school record but I really don’t like to flaunt it, unless some brat shoots his mouth off and desperately needs correction.

Maybe I misinterpreted the whole thing and the kid was genuinely curious. If so, he had horrible, horrible timing.