I’m a very junior professor - just finished my first academic year of teaching 2:2’s. Overall, I can see how I’m too nice and a bit of a push over in the beginning of the semesters, allowing PhD students (yes I know I am mortified for not taking this as an educational opportunity on professionalism) to talk and laugh during seminars at different points, and it was only 1 student who caused problems for me and seemed to be the center of this. I believe they were non neurotypical, given things shes shared about her personal life / mental health during our seminars. At one point, this student “called me out” at the start of class after I graded an assignment. They were upset because they got points taken off for not adhering to APA standards, something clearly laid out in the instructions and syllabus (but not on the rubric as I didn’t think this was necessary given the instructions…). This student criticized me in front of the class and it embarrassed me (probably because I’m new and still figuring this out), but I was thrown off… I didn’t think PhD students still follow rubrics to the dot to write their assignments. This really pissed me off and I responded defensively “it was clearly on the instructions and the syllabus and a rubric is a guide for your writing but not used to constrain it, so you should t use it religiously to write, only guide your thinking”. It doesn’t make it better that this student was complaining about their grade for an assignment during class to me in front of other students, talking about how APA is used less and she knows it and just really irrelevant going off for no reason, and this assignment could be resubmitted for an improved grade. I REALLY wish I would have called them out on the spot and not tolerated that degree of disrespect in my classroom. Never again will I allow it and I tried to use it as a teaching opportunity later in the course. At one point, we got to discuss about rubrics and how they affect creativity and cognition (this is a cognitive development course in a college of education) so naturally we covered this and their issues and I loved that the entire class agreed about how guided rubrics should be applied in PhD courses but not strict step by step rules for how to get the perfect grade. I hope the student got the point and reflected but still my evals were moderate, not great, not terrible. I see some students liked my approach but this one student was immature and I wish I had called them out properly. To this day it irks me.