A Conflict Memory

Last semester, I had a number of extremely disturbing conflicts in one of my classes. I had a professor who was awfully condescending, offensive, and at times somewhat racist. This professor claimed to have our best interest in mind throughout the semester, but it was clear that he played favorites in the classroom, and I was not one of those favorites.

            In the beginning of the class, I was struggling with comprehending the material so I would ask questions in order to receive help. Instead of being eager to teach me, my professor was patronizing and apparently could not believe that I actually needed help. After encountering his audacity when I tried to understand the work better, I never went to him for help again. This made it hard on me because I had to work twice as hard to figure things out on my own, but to me it was a better alternative than having to speak to him one on one and feeling judged and extremely stupid.

            Coming into college I knew I would come across people who would test my patience, but my very opinionated professor took that to a whole new level. He somehow turned our class into a politics class where he tried to persuade his students into believing the way he did. (Let me remind you that the class description had nothing to do with this.) I won’t go into detail for privacy reasons, but let’s just say that my professor had very detailed opinions about certain races and if we didn’t agree with him at some point, we were not one of those favorites that I previously mentioned.

I sat through this class with so many comments going through my head that I never actually told my professor. Instead, I would take my anger out by venting to my parents. I felt irritated, angry, disturbed, and so much more during that entire semester because of his one class. Looking back, I am glad I chose not to express my feelings towards him because I believe that I, as a student, should respect my professors even if they may have different beliefs than I do. I also felt that telling him my opinions on how he taught would not be worth my time. All I kept thinking to myself those three months was “It’s only one semester.”

Usually in conflicts, I have no problem expressing myself and telling the other person how I feel about them. For example, if it were a family member, a friend, or even a random stranger, I would generally like to get everything out in the open. But in this particular conflict, I thought it would be best that I reduce my very strong emotions.