Sensation (h.s)

Chapter Seven

✺ K A T E ' S ✺ P O V ✺

It takes all of my strength to force myself out of bed and to get ready for my first class. The last thing that I wanted to do was to have to wake up and face the man who made me feel like utter shit yesterday with only a few hateful words. I allowed him to get to me though and I shouldn't have. I knew better than to try and form some sort of friendship with someone while I'm at this stage in my life. Lena is the only exception because she lives with me.

When I walk into his lecture hall, everything looks and feels the same. I expected some surprise factor after our fallout, even though I had no idea what. The sinister part of my brain silently wished I'd show up to class and all of his things would be gone and so would he. I don't want to have to face him after everything, but I also don't want to give him reason to report me. He has nothing to talk to The Dean about if I'm in class and doing my work without complaint.

I barely acknowledge the lesson when he begins teaching. He spends most of his time discussing the topic of the journal entries while students ask questions and laugh along with him to his cheesy jokes. I try my hardest to not pay much mind to anything until he announces the assignment. Instead of looking at him though, I stare out the window and listen silently so that I can complete the work without giving him the satisfaction of having my attention.

At some point throughout the class he announces that he's going to walk around and pass back some graded journal entries from the past few weeks. I continue writing the assignment while keeping my headphones in my ears while he filters around to students, conversing like old friends with a few and at least greeting the rest.

When he finally comes around to pass back my assignments, he sets down the papers on my desk and walks away without any sort of hesitation. I grab for the assignments and my eyes nearly bulge out of my head when I see an F written in angry red marker on the top of the paper. As I begin flipping through the multiple assignments that were passed back, I notice a pattern in the grading. All of them around scores below half of the points with idiotic side notes stating that I didn't understand the concept or that my ideas weren't developed well enough.

By the time class ends, I'm about to blow a gasket with anger.

I wait until all of the students are out of the room to storm up to his desk. The papers are nearly ripped from how tightly in grasping them in my hands, but I don't care. I'm prepared to burn the assignments as soon as I clear up the grades.

"What the hell is this? Are you honestly failing me on every assignment over some childish vendetta that you have against me because I tried to be your friend?" I jump right into my angry words, slamming the papers down on his desk with a pathetic amount of force.

"Ms. Stevenson, please control your tone and remember who you're talking to. When you're ready to speak to me in a civilized manner then I would be happy to discuss my grading system with you." He answers back emotionlessly, eyeing me from his chair.

"This is a civilized manner. As civilized as it gets for you thinking you can give me a failing grade on a paper that you asked me to write sharing my opinion. You can't grade it based off of validity because it's my own opinion." I cross my arms over my chest and watch as he thinks up whatever snarky response he has next.

"No, but I can grade it on thoroughness and clarification of your ideas. You lack development in your writing greatly and of course it's going to effect your grade. This is a college level writing course. If you would like to disagree on the rubric of what skill level you should have achieved by this age then maybe you should consider a lower level class." He passes the papers back to me without saying anything else while I stand silently, slightly dumbfounded. Did he just insult my intelligence level?