#i still got called lazy even though my teachers knew i had adhd and autism | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

fakeboitherottengirl · 4 years

Text

Classrooms Should Not Be A “Safe Space”

There should be no classroom where a student feels unwelcome for trying to learn and better themselves. Especially in areas like racial/cultural/gender studies, these should be places of LEARNING not just regurgitating what you all already agree with. Let people ask questions. Let people get it wrong and correct them.

Sophomore year, I joined a sociology class that required no prerequisites or major (aka a beginner class open to everybody) and was really excited and open to the fact that it was run by the Black Studies department because I thought “wow, something other than the white upper class sociology professor, cool.” When I got there, I was the only white person, and one of three non-black people. All the students appeared to know the professor already from other classes, who gave off that “cool guy” vibe by opening his classes with music videos and saying ‘fuck’ a lot. I mentioned him to a friend who had taken a class with him before and knew him as a person (she was black) and she advised I drop the class right away. I thought she was saying this because the class itself was hard, but when I asked her, shed taken a different class and still advised me to drop it. We were reading “All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave” which is an amazing book and I was really into the class so I didn’t.

I sensed some hostility from the professor building until one day I got up to go to the bathroom and he started yelling “You have no respect, you think you can just come and go you don’t respect the class or me” and I profusely apologized and explained that the Disability Resource Center should have sent him a letter that I was on medication and would likely need to use the restroom once or more per class. I went to the restroom and took all my stuff and left crying (Im REALLY bad about being yelled at by authority figures) and one of the boys followed me out and was another person who told me, concerned, “Drop the class”. I had to keep the class to have a full-time schedule or I couldnt live on campus so I had no other option by that point in the semester.

A few weeks later, I was reading along on my laptop (which id brought to every previous class, as my disability accommodations allowed it) and he thought i wasnt paying attention so he came by me and slammed a textbook to the ground next to me as hard as he could. Im autistic, and the loud noise startled me and I started sniffling and he grabbed my laptop really roughly by the screen so the bottom part was hanging, saw that i was reading along, and then dropped it back on my desk with no apology. I had a panic attack and left the class and, according to somebody who stayed, changed the topic of the day to my “white fragility” and that I was a “crying white woman” (which like technically yea but i wasnt crying because white guilt or being called racist I was crying because I was autistic and startled with a sudden loud noise which is a major trigger).

There were other smaller incidents (he had a major problem with my absences and took them personally even though i have a chronic illness and was absent from every class just the same, I even went out of my way to try to get to his because I was so afraid of him by then). There was a time where we were talking about drugs and he asked a question about “what drug can get you a life sentence in jail” and I answered “LSD” because there had recently been a case in the news of exactly that happening and so of course I thought he was referring to that and was looking forward to finally getting something right. How he corrected me: “This girl, again. Black people don’t DO acid”. Then he went on to talk about the crack epidemic and i was like oh that makes sense but what I said wasnt wrong?

He was yelling at me “Do you ever pay any attention? You barely even show up. You probably expect me to hand you an A just for taking this class”. This was at the end of class, and I said to him (crying, again, because i cant talk to ‘real adults’ without melting down) that I had autism and ADHD, that they were both on file with the DRC, and he said my learning disorder and disability were excuses that white people used “to give a head start to their lazy children” and that it was “entitled” of me to ask that my accommodations be respected because my disability was really just white laziness and he made a really good point about how black kids are less likely to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and are treated as behavioral cases which yeah 100% correct but he used it as a way to say “these disabilities dont really exist” not “these disabilities are under-diagnosed in certain communities”.

The final straw was my midterm paper. I wrote on the book I mentioned above, a really good paper that I worked really hard on that met all the requirements of the rubric. It came back to me marked C- without any notes or corrections on it, while everybody else had red writing all over their pages. I mentioned it to my friend who had taken his class before and she said “Oh, he wont give the white kids higher than a C-, its the lowest grade he can give without having to cite a reason. Hes bragged about it” (she knew him on a personal level, like been-to-his-house-for-dinner personal). So I ripped the paper up and never went back to his class and just let him fail me for attendance. It was the first class I ever failed.

The entire time I was trying to learn, I was treated like an outsider. This was not the BSU or the African Heritage Society or any place where I should have been treated any different than any other student (those places would have been well right to reject me as those are not my spaces). This was an entry-level classroom, but to the professor I did not belong there even though I paid the same tuition as my classmates. Every question was treated as hostile. Every mistake was a personal insult. Ive seen the same thing happen in my women’s lit classes or feminist-related sociology classes done to male students, although I can only speak to my own experiences, its distressing for EVERYBODY in the room, not just the person the professor targets.

If you are in a classroom in good faith willing to learn, you belong in that classroom. Professors who act otherwise do nothing but scare people who want to learn away from knowledge (I was afraid to take any classes that overlapped with the Black Studies department after that until my senior year when I took a literature class that overlapped, which was lovely and I learned a lot because the professor was interested in teaching). There are clubs, student unions, etc that are wonderful to serve as a safe space and a space that excludes those outside of the community but the classroom, where we all pay the same to be, can NOT be a “safe space”. Classrooms, if anything, should be a DANGEROUS space full of ideas and feedback that threaten the world view you walked in with.

IDK mostly this is just venting about a shitty professor because Im tweaking but yeah him and this lady I took a “women in drama” class with were two of the worst professors in existence and you shouldn’t take pride in making somebody afraid to learn. IDK. I feel like these kind of classes can really bring out abusive personality types because it is somehow implicit that there are some students you are allowed to abuse and take the high road if you get called on it (a MAN complaining about his FEMALE teacher in a class on WOMEN automatically looks bad). IDK. Abusive teachers are real and do real damage.

9 notes · View notes