My professor [30F] called me [19M] autistic.

Your teacher was rude, no doubt about it. That's not a particularly appropriate comment.

But coming from the other side of the spectrum, maybe she was having a bad day. Teaching is hard. My girlfriend is a high school teacher and sometimes a single day is absolute murder on her: Kids can say stuff that will cut deep, and having to deal with that for 8 hours on a near-constant basis, with no ability to take a break during a given period, can stress you to the breaking point. I was a TA for years and lectured to undergrad and grad students and dealt with similar stuff myself. The grad students, at least, were not so much younger, and I had a lot of great students overall, but every now and then you get one that makes it obvious that they dislike you.

Point being, you can either allow this to upset you or you can be more meta about this and conclude, probably correctly, that she was having a shitty day. I would apologize for interrupting her at some point, and then just let it be. Trust me when I tell you that professors and teachers in general don't always get that kind of consideration from students and when they do get it, they remember it. One of my former profs, who I eventually ended up doing research for and who became my best recommender for grad school, is a guy who I reached out to with a friendly "hey, I really enjoy your class" when it looked like some political factors were putting the screws to him and stuff in the class was slipping. This isn't high school; there's no way that being nice to a prof is going to lead to a negative outcome.

/r/relationships Thread