My history professor said today in her lecture that the sea people were refugees from the Thera eruption and tsunami that needed new places to live so they conquered the Hittite Empire, The Babylonian Empire, Mycenae, and almost Egypt. This seemed wonky to me, and I looked it up after class because I seemed to remember seeing a documentary that said we don't know who the Sea People really were, and none of the sources that I found agreed with her lecture. In fact, I found many sources saying that there wasn't actually a 500 ft tall tsunami like she said and the sea people's origins are a mystery.The way she put it, the Thera eruption and invasions of the Sea People single handedly caused the Bronze Age Collapse. This doesn't fit with what I found online at all, or what I previously knew. I am debating on whether or not to withdraw from the class, I don't want to keep getting faulty information. Is my professor dead wrong? It is a community college after all, and she has said some questionable things before
Good question! However, there is not much in the way of a definitive explanation for the destruction of Thera, due to the fact that the information is coming mainly from archaeological sources (and from all around the Mediterranean too).
The problem with attributing the destruction of Thera to emergence the Sea People is that there is only one set of primary sources for them, with the Sea People leaving next to no evidence of their own. These sources are found in Egypt and note the Sea Peoples as being from Denyen, Ekwesh, Lukka, Peleset, Shekelesh, Sherden, Teresh, Tjeker and Weshesh. These names are generally taken to be bastardisations of the native names of different groups (ie. Danoi, Achaeans, Lycians, etc.). The existence of the Sea Peoples comes almost solely from that list of names as well as the discovery of tholoi (watchtowers) that date to around that time, suggesting that the people in the Mediterranean were subject to sea-raids.
At the same time, we don't know much about the end of the Bronze Age for a number of reasons, such as the fact that we can't read Linear A (the main Minoan script).
The destruction of Thera itself has generally been accepted as being due to the eruption of the Santorini volcano, which may have caused the '500 ft' tsunami that your teacher mentioned (but note that this itself is still a mystery). The fact that only one gold object (the golden ibex) has been found at Akrotiri and also the lack of bodies (in contrast to, say, Pompeii and Herculaneum with the spectacular finds there) suggests that there was an evacuation but to say that the Theran refugees were the original Sea Peoples is to confuse correlation with causation.
Hope this helps with your problem!
As for dropping out of class, having a bad teacher (and knowing that your teacher is wrong) can be incentive to do even better, since it teaches you critical reasoning and encourages you to find your own information.