The question you’re scared to ask in class is the one five other people are praying someone asks.

Confusion is rarely private in a room of thirty. If the explanation lost you, it lost several other people at the same point, and every one of them is doing the same calculation about whether asking makes them look slow. The silence is not evidence that everybody else understood. It is evidence that everybody made the same bet.

Ask it plainly, without the apology at the front. Just say which part you did not follow. Watch what happens on the faces around you, because that is what changes how you feel about asking next time.