Thanks For Sticking Up For Us
I had been attending a journalism class that was held in a lecture hall. The teacher was an absolute immature nightmare and would spend the first thirty minutes of every class on a diatribe about the infantile students and their lack of turning in homework, arriving late, yadda, yadda.
After sitting through that for about a month, one day I’d had my fill. On that day there was a kid who rode public transportation—which was very unpredictable—and arrived five minutes late. It was a test day, and if you missed it, you were in trouble because it made up 50% of your grade for that class.
This lecture hall had two doors to enter through, across the room from each other. This kid arrived and went to the door most of us entered through but the teacher had locked it.
He saw us looking at him and kept asking for someone to let him in. Meanwhile, the teacher was ignoring him while she was on her rant. Someone motioned for him to go to the other door, which wasn’t locked. The teacher caught the hand signals and ran to the other door and locked it just as he arrived at it.
He kept asking her to let him in while apologizing for being late. Instead, she stood there yelling at him through the small lecture door window about how she was sick to death of people not respecting her classroom.
Then, she turned around and ignored him while she yelled at the rest of us about her other classes and their disrespect towards her. She went to the chalkboard and started grabbing erasers and throwing them at random people. The class sat there silent, afraid to move.
Most of the students were around 18, but I was a graduate student. I’d had enough and thought to myself, this is crazy, and I wasn’t going to sit through it anymore. By now, she had her back to us, still screaming and scrawling on the board the things she felt were disrespectful to her in giant letters.
So, I took my heaviest textbook and with all my force, slammed it as hard as I could on my desk. I stood up and simultaneously yelled, “ENOUGH, STOP IT”!! She, and the entire lecture hall, jumped a mile high, startled.
She spun around, almost possessed-like with her anger, to see who had had the gall to challenge her, and was shocked to see that it was me. I continued,
“ENOUGH! THESE ARE KIDS, BUT I’M AN ADULT AND I’LL BE DARNED IF YOUR GOING TO WASTE MY MONEY SCREAMING AND YELLING ABOUT HOW IMMATURE THEY ARE WHEN YOU’RE BEHAVING WORSE!! ENOUGH. STOP IT, OR I’LL REPORT YOU”!
She grew very quiet and then said, “You’re right. You’re absolutely right, and I apologize to you for including you in my tantrum”. I sat down and shook my head in a nod of acknowledgment, and the class proceeded as normal.
Afterwards, all the kids came up to me to thank me for sticking up for them, and I told them they never have to accept bad behavior from anyone, least of all someone their money is paying for. Story credit: Reddit