If You're Being Humiliated By Your Teacher, Here's What You Should Do

School can be a challenging mix, particularly if you're still in your teenage years, but even in college. While it's always great to hang out with friends, party and live it up, those fun parts are like punctuation marks around the main event: classes. The only thing worse than a boring teacher is a mean teacher. Although a lot of parents don't believe their children when they say that their teacher is targeting them, this is a real problem some students face, per La Trobe University.

Parents tend to focus more on knowing if their kid is a bully or if they're being bullied, whereas teacher bullying, which has the potential to pack a larger punch than student bullying, usually goes unnoticed. Teachers are in a position of power (per Great Schools,) so if a student fights back against their meanness, thing may actually get worse, per Sweety High. Teachers who humiliate their students usually use a bunch of excuses about the student's grades to excuse their behavior. They might nitpick on every single thing that the student does, until the student feels too unnerved to actually learn, per Thought Co.

But you don't have to just lie there and take it. There are helpful strategies to face the situation.

With teachers who humiliate their students, a large factor of this has to do with feeling of power they get from the act. This can be seen in the way most of them restrict their bullying to the classroom, per Learning For Justice.

It can be frustrating when a teacher constantly targets you and humiliates you in class, but you should never lose your cool. Rather, remove yourself from the situation, per Western Governors University. If you are a student who isn't too academically gifted and often gets below-average grades, lashing out will only give the teacher a perfect justification for the unfair treatment, while also further cementing your bad reputation in the eyes of other teachers, per Sweety High. Suddenly you aren't just a student with bad or middling grades; you've also gotten yourself the reputation of being a problem child.

The next thing you have to do is gather evidence of your teacher's misdeeds. It's sad to admit it, but not much attention is paid to teachers who bully, per WebMD. This is why you need evidence: recordings, and written witness accounts by your classmates, per Very Well Family.

Then you need to report this teacher, preferably with evidence in hand, per Very Well Family. Although teachers seem powerful, they have to answer to someone, and you should know that you have options. If going to the higher-ups doesn't work, you can switch classes or switch to a different teacher, per Understood.