There’s always that class. The one where half the room treats lecture time like a group study hall for TikTok, YouTube, and whatever game is open behind an Excel spreadsheet.

For one student, months of watching classmates completely tune out their professor finally boiled over. According to OP, almost nobody in this class pays attention anymore. The professor asks questions? Silence. Tries to encourage discussion? More silence. Meanwhile people are openly watching videos, gaming, or chatting through lectures while the professor keeps trying to push through and teach anyway.

What really set OP off was being one of the only students consistently participating. So when they got stuck answering a discussion question and the professor tried asking the room for help—only to be met with total indifference again—they snapped.

Cue an angry speech about wasting everyone’s time, disrespecting the professor, and why people even bother showing up if they refuse to engage at all.

AITA for yelling at my fellow classmates for the way they acted towards the professor.

I will say that apart of me felt it was necessary to yell at them and apart of me is saying that what I did was entirely wrong and could’ve been handled a lot more better or let the professor handle it, since they’re the professionals.

I guess I should start from the beginning, where recently I’ve began to notice that for this semester and for this particular class which was POM that nobody ever paid attention to the professor.

In fact I would even say that they were paying attention more to their laptops or phones rather than the actual lecture at hand.

How rude.

I know this because I’ve seen this kind of stuff since the beginning of my 2nd semester where people in the class were either playing games or watching YouTube videos

. Now granted this is an easy class since everything is done on the computer with excel. But you would still need to know the formulas and the functions in order to even know how to do your assignments.

However today was a particular a bad day for me.

Here it comes…

When the professor started his lecture and tried to test our understanding, I mostly tried to answer his questions or ask him questions.

I would even say that I’m the only one who tries to ask him anything related to the lecture or try to contribute in any way, so when I got stuck on one of the class discussion questions and nobody was there to answer it.

When he asked somebody else to answer nobody did, people were once again paying attention to their phones, laptops or just straight up talking in the back of the class with their friends.

That’s just straight up frustrating.

So I just blew up and went on a tangent on how there’s no point in showing up to class if all they’re going to do is nothing meaningful.

And that the professor is trying to be patient and help students succeed in his class but his effort is for nothing if every student here is doing nothing.

AITA?

Reddit mostly leaned YTA, even though plenty of people understood why OP was frustrated. A lot of commenters agreed the classmates sounded rude and disengaged, especially toward a professor who genuinely seemed to be trying. But most felt the outburst crossed the line from understandable irritation into self-righteous classroom policing.

The biggest point people kept making was that college students are adults paying to be there, and if they want to waste their own tuition scrolling on their phones, that’s ultimately their problem—not another student’s responsibility to correct. Several commenters also pointed out that public yelling probably embarrassed the professor just as much as the disengaged students did.

That said, a smaller group voted NTA, arguing that someone finally saying what everyone was thinking may have been harsh, but not entirely wrong.

Overall, Reddit’s feeling was basically: valid frustration, wrong delivery.

This person says YTA.

This person agrees.

And this person says the intent was good…

Nothing says “class participation” quite like getting yelled at by the one student actually listening.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman who was stunned when her friends finally admitted the reason for their falling out.