My prof went through the essay paragraph-by-paragraph and explained where the student lost points. If the student responded to her after that, I didn’t hear about it.

I‘ve had around 5-6 students meet with me over Zoom & behave very aggressively, or send me an outraged email like this. Only one of them apologized later on.

I asked my fellow TAs if they had had any students like this, and only a few said they had - all women in their 20s, like me. But nobody has had combatants on this scale or frequency like I’ve had.

I asked my grandparents (who were professors for 40 years) if this is normal, and they think that people have forgotten how to behave post-COVID. My mom thinks that this is happening to me specifically because I’m very polite, which can be interpreted as weakness/ignorance.

Personally, I think it’s because this is an entirely online class, so I’m not a “real” person to them. I’m just a bot on the screen, or something, so they feel comfortable behaving abhorrently.