I was harassed throughout almost the entire class that I had this morning. It's the only class where a student or students have consistently harassed me.
Most of this semester was a lot better than I thought it was going to be, in terms of harassment; I thought that a lot more people would harass me than did. I think that most people are too concerned about their schoolwork and everything else that they have to do to spend time stalking or harassing me. Unfortunately, there is one student in the class that I have on Friday mornings who has harassed me a lot for the past several times that we've had the class. It's getting worse every week.
I have verbally confronted him in class a few times over the past weeks, saying things such as "Please stop," "I have enough problems already," and "I'm taking this class because I want to know the subject." He laughs and pretends that he doesn't know what I'm talking about, and he doesn't stop.
At least one other person has started to harass me, also; they were high-fiving each other in the hallway when class was over. They're probably hoping that they'll get positive attention from the conglomerate for abusing me.
It's difficult to concentrate in class when this is happening. Today and last week, I heard almost nothing that the professor was saying, because this student was coughing almost the entire time, I knew he was doing it deliberately, and not only was he disruptive, I was thinking about what I should try to do to stop what's happening.
I have homework due tomorrow, for a class for which there will also be a test. I have a lot of work to do today, and I shouldn't have to spend time documenting being harassed.
I can't publish all of the harassment that I recorded; the class is two hours and forty-five minutes, and he coughed throughout almost all of that time. I started by recording it with a tape recorder, and I don't have an audioblog where I can publish the recordings. I hoped that he would stop when he saw the tape recorder, but he didn't. I also can't publish videos that are more than 15 minutes at YouTube, because YouTube doesn't publish videos past that amount of time at people's blogs. It would take hours for me to publish all of it.
I got a cold at the beginning of this week, which I talked about at YouTube. One of the reasons that I wasn't at work this past Tuesday was that I didn't want to be coughing and sneezing around other people all day. I try to apologize every time that I have to cough or sneeze around people, so that they know that I'm not harassing them.
I finally started to record with my phone, also, because I knew that I could publish the recordings directly from my phone.
I have done nothing to provoke anyone who is harassing me in that class. The people who are doing it are obviously enjoying it, no matter how politely I ask that it stop; they seem to be trying to make me angry or to get me to leave the class.
I went to my apartment after writing all of that. I have spent at least half an hour videotaping the tape recording that I recorded this morning. Although I asked the professor at the beginning of the semester if I could record the class, and she said that I could, and although it's not unusual for students to record classes so that they have the recordings to help them study, I'm concerned that publishing those recordings without consent from everyone in the class would be a privacy violation.
It happened, though; that student harasses me. He knows that's what he's doing, he doesn't care that he's disrupting the class, he thinks it's funny, and it's starting to turn into bullying that's being done by him and another student in the class.
Copyright L. Kochman, April 22, 2016 @ 3:09 p.m.
