This is a story from CougarBlue, an online magazine about BYU sports. By my lights, the good bits start right around where it says “It was in high school that I learned another rule of the playground: Jocks got passed.”

My mother is a teacher. It’s what she is, not just what she does. I’ve lost count of how many professional journalists got their start in her classes.

And by the way? Vai Sikahema isn’t kidding when he says she made him work like the dickens. She was like that. When I started at Mesa High, she quietly made it clear that for me to get an A in any of her classes was going to require about twice as much work as it would for anyone else — and she made me call her “Mrs. Nielsen” in class, too.

I got a certain amount of revenge a few times in her beginning journalism class, which met just before lunch, by raising my hand near the end of the period and saying “Mrs. Nielsen? You forgot to give me my lunch money this morning…”