Paranoia, Paranoia....

After talking about not exposing your underbelly someone got mine.

School has been a wonderful experience for me. It's gotten me back in the world. I got to meet people, have adult discussions, learn things. It has been a safe place.

Brick has a job that pisses people off. He's good at it. It has never effected how any teachers treated me until now. Occasionally there would be a student who would have a problem with Brick and when they found out I was married to him they'd stop talking to me but it was rare and the teachers were always supportive, friendly, and, if they had a problem with him, able to treat me as a separate person who isn't responsible for explaining his actions.

It happened with the teacher I would expect it from the least, one of the ones I respected the most, one I liked a lot. There were occasional remarks about police officers in general...fair game. It's a class about law and I am under no illusions that all officers are perfect, that I am under any obligation to explain them, or that any of them, but one, has anything to do with me. So maybe I should have seen it coming when he jokingly said he wanted to see what it would take to make me angry. He found it.

The last couple of weeks the comments have been a lot more focused on one officer in particular, Brick. I even skipped class half of last week because I just didn't want to deal with the atmosphere that was developing. But this week is finals. I figured I'd go in, take the review class, take the test, no problem.

Near the beginning of class the teacher starts talking about an incident involving someone at the school and Brick. He uses no names but it's obvious to everyone exactly who the officer is. And he says the 'when he was shown to be wrong, the Officer changed his story' so he would still win the case. In other words, he lied, he comitted perjury. Then there was a class discussion, led by the teacher, of the Officer's motives for lying.

Well.... if he was going to go over to the darkside after 30 years I'm glad he did it over something important like a $82 ticket.

It was all I could do to not run out of class. I made it through the next hour+ by writing lines of gibberish in my legal pad and thinking 'Hang on, just hang on.' and managed to get to my car before I started crying. I've been crying for two days.

It's not just the humiliation of having my husband called a liar in front of my classmates, it's the knowledge that school is no longer a safe place, I'm scheduled for three classes with this guy next quarter and I've already purchased the textbooks, he's my advisor, there are no other teachers in my program, it's too late in the year to transfer to another school (where I will have a long commute each day), and I am faced with a situation I have no skills to deal with.

I know how to let things slide and I know how to destroy people. It's everything in between that I have trouble with.

Would the spouses of people in other proffesions have to listen to this sort of crap? Would anyone else have to hear about the 'crimes' of their family member in front of their classmates?

What's really stupid is if the teacher had asked Brick for his version before he shared it with the class as if the accusations were the gospel, he would have heard a reasonable explanation for what he's characterizing as 'changing his story'. I expected better of this guy. I was wrong