The Hostility Increases
Over the next few weeks the hostility in the classroom continued to rise. Frequently he would accuse us of not studying when we asked him questions about the chapter. We would have to ask the same question over and over to get any kind of response. Finally he would get frustrated and tell us we should be using his study technique, and that if we were using it correctly we wouldn’t have to ask him any questions. If we pushed further he would reexplain how to study. This ate up about fifteen minutes of class time every time. I can’t even express how frustrating this was. We were all there to learn, we were asking questions, trying to participate in the learning experience and he wanted nothing to do with it.
Sometimes he would raise his arms with frustration and tell us how easy our program was. Telling us only an idiot wouldn’t understand the course material.
“Do you think you guys have it hard? This is nothing compared to chiropractic school. This shit is easy. Massage school is a walk in the park. If you just studied this wouldn’t be so hard for you.”
“Its not fair to compare your schooling with ours!” Dallas piped up. “You’ve already been to massage school, of course this is easy to you.”
“It was easy when I went through it too.” He replied.
“It might be easy for you, but it isn’t for us.” She yelled.
“If you guys just studied and data mined it would be easy.”
“We do, we all do. You keep saying we don’t study, but the real problem is you don’t answer any of our questions.”
“I shouldn’t have to answer any of your questions.”
“You are the teacher, that is your job!” She continued to yell.
This was how it was every day with Mr. Lounds. Every class was a battle, we would fight to learn until we were too beat to continue.
One day I had enough, and I asked him after class if he would change his teaching methods. He told me the way he was teaching the class was how the administration wanted him to, and if he changed it he would get fired. I think he was trying to have a heart to heart with me, or at least his version of one. He said he really wanted to teach the school in a more engaging way but couldn’t. The curriculum was written in such a way that he had to be hard on us, to push us to succeed. He told me that the administration was the problem, and if I went to them they wouldn’t do anything because they didn’t care.
Out of everything he said his last statement was the most believable. Recently one of the other students reported him for the way he treated her in class and the school didn’t do anything about it. She wasn’t the only one, there were other students who said they reported him and to no surprise nothing came of their complaints.
I settled in with the fact that we were stuck with this guy, he wasn’t going to change.
Sometime later at the beginning of class he said we were going to eliminate the ten-minute breaks at the end of each hour, so we could leave early. I protested, but as expected my opinion didn’t matter. I told him that I needed the breaks at the end of each hour because it helped me digest the lecture.
He said, “This isn’t about you, not everything is about you.”
He was right, this wasn’t about me, or anyone else in the class. It was solely about him. The reason he wanted to end the class early was because he had a long drive home and wanted to get back at a decent hour. I thought he should have considered that reality before taking the job. Instead of fighting a battle I knew I couldn’t win I chose to resign to his new rule.
For a while I became a quiet little mouse and stopped interacting with him. This led him to start targeting other students. Throughout class he would insult and berate their intelligence, often leading to heated arguments and students storming out of class. Some students stopped coming to school, it made me wonder how they were still in the program. I thought there was a maximum number of days a student could miss before they were expelled.
After some time I think he started to like me. He became more comfortable telling me increasingly inappropriate things before class. One day I arrived super early, Jarnell, Mr. Lounds and I were the only people in the room. This was one of the weirdest interactions I had with the instructor. This was the day he thought it was wise to define various racial slurs. He spent a considerable amount of time focusing on the N-word. No one was interacting with him which made it all the stranger.
As time continued he started using profanities in class and directed them toward students. He became more brazen and bolder with his condescending remarks. I can’t even count the number of times he made the female students cry during class.
Eventually I found myself unable to tolerate the way he was guiding my education. I reached a boiling point and I had to do something about it. I wrote him an email detailing how his instruction methods were failing me and hurting the class. On the next day he brought in a copy of the email, then told me to read it aloud to the other students.
