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Original post by zyrolasting
The family attributes it to my autism (trait being lack of empathy), but I think it's just more of something I need to get over.
This may be a source of problems with your peers, if true (ie. you've been diagnosed with it and aren't self-diagnosing/being "diagnosed" by your parents). Most people notice those who are "funny" and often respond to them negatively and with prejudice, though they may not be aware of exactly why.
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I pressed my request.
No. Don't do this in class. Only ever ask for clarification once on a particular subject, and at most three times in one lecture. Anything more makes you look like an idiot and it reflects badly on the teacher, too. Making yourself look like an idiot in this way not only makes you look like an idiot, but it does so in a way that is decidedly not endearing to the other students in the lecture. Take it up in private with him if you genuinely do not understand/do not believe/have a gripe with a significant segment of the lecture. In fact, while we're on the subject if you have any opinion that runs directly counter to something a prof has said, take it up with them in private.
Doing otherwise wastes valuable lecture time that the other students could be using to learn and progress in the course. If you're asking your prof (or anyone, really) to rephrase a significant part of the lecture, that is akin to saying, "I don't understand and not only have I not taken the time to think about what you've just said, but I also don't want to, so spoonfeed me please." I don't think I have to say that beyond first-year, university != spoonfeeding and shouldn't be.
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I DO think I am telling people exactly what I think,
This is probably not a good idea to do outside of the internet. In fact, I'd say half the time it's an outright
bad idea. I do admit that I tend to call it like I see it, but I usually avoid being blunt about it even on the internet.
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appeasing the crowd...
Hearing other views on just how intimidating I was to the herd
This is a bad way of thinking. It leads to arrogance (in fact, it IS arrogance) and pretentiousness, and this will almost certainly lead to more friction with others. You are not above "the herd"; as a point of fact, at least during a lecture, you are a
part of the herd. We all are.
All of the above aside, asking excessively for clarification can get really,
really annoying to the other students. I remember there being a student in one (actually, several) first-year and second-year computer science classes who was always asking what I thought were decidedly unintelligent questions. Now, this is not a bad thing in and of itself, since it's understandable that some people don't have the programming experience to make certain inferences from the material presented, but what was annoying about this guy was that he was
constantly asking them, about half the things in the course, over and over again. It was like he was "deaf in one ear", intellectually speaking. I saw him again in a physics class. I don't know about the other students, but I certainly found him annoying after a little while. For comparison, just going by what I've seen of the others specifically in my degree (CPSC), we tend to not ask questions in lecture unless we have a specific point to ask about.
