Sir, That’s My Emotional Support Educator

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My 11th-grade AP English teacher’s name was Jenny Wei. She kept a life-size cardboard cutout of Jacob from Twilight behind her desk, had a mouse pad shaped like a corgi’s butt, and, if you said something in class she found particularly delightful, would let out either a prolonged shriek or a wicked, snorting laugh somewhere between a giggle and a cackle. Causing that laugh (as I often did) filled me with great pride, but what made me prouder was seeing her feedback on essays, timed writes, or—once, in a decision I can only describe as unhinged—a piece of fanfiction I’d written.

Amid the tumult and confusion of my adolescence, Ms. Wei just got me. She saw my enthusiasm for writing, helped me hone and develop my skills, but more importantly, she understood parts of me that not many other people in my life did: namely, my love for fandom (and, more specifically, my teenage crush on Bill Hader). She made me, and so many of her other students, feel seen and heard—which is why, to this day, I continue to seek out her wisdom (and her wit), over bowls of ramen on 3rd Avenue or mini cupcakes and Paris Breakfast tea in her condo. I call her my “emotional support English teacher,” a moniker that is as much a sincere and accurate summation of what she means to me—to so many of her students—as it is a nod to a Tumblr meme.

I’m a bit of an outlier among my friends in that I still keep in touch with several of my teachers, from volunteering with Ms. Taylor, my 2nd/3rd-grade teacher, to occasional backyard tea with Mrs. Mamis, who taught me math and social studies in middle school before co-leading my high school Girl Scout troop. There’s just something about finding a great teacher, a really great teacher who really gets you, that just hits different. School is an institution designed to enforce compliance with rigid educational and social standards. These expectations can feel outdated and, at times, dehumanizing: we feel the pressure to excel, to succeed, to conform, and our self-worth becomes increasingly entangled with grades and test scores. A good teacher reminds us that we are more than our statistics and achievements: a good teacher sees us, first and foremost, as people.

This affirmation and engagement with our personhood becomes all the more crucial—and elusive—in college, as classes swell from small rooms to massive lecture halls seating hundreds of students at a time. The elitism and privilege still entrenched in the systems and faculty of higher education can be alienating, even hostile, particularly for those of us who are marginalized. We don’t always see people who look like us on campus. Our professors don’t always respect our pronouns or understand why we might want content warnings for assigned readings and videos. And they may not always be willing to lend us grace for assignment deadlines when our circumstances (physical, mental, emotional) make it difficult to meet them.

Although I attended a large, well-known university, my college experience was very different from many of my classmates. My degree program was situated in a smaller college on campus, the College of Creative Studies, a little yellow-and-green former military barracks where the total student population rarely broke 400, and our classes consisted largely of writer’s workshops (at least for us writing and lit majors) and discussion seminars. Mentorship was a core component of CCS: the smaller class sizes (and weekly coffee hours on the patio) allowed for more opportunities to develop deeper relationships with professors, opportunities to know them not only as academics but as creatives, as nerds like ourselves, as people, that were not as available or accessible elsewhere on campus.

I encountered a number of professors I enjoyed and respected through my writing classes, both inside and outside of CCS, but the one who made perhaps the biggest impact was Dr. Michelle Petty Grue, who taught our first-year introductory creative writing course before officially joining the faculty the following year. Michelle quickly became, in many of our eyes, a rockstar: a professor of composition and writing studies firmly dedicated to incorporating an antiracist, intersectional framework into her teaching, rooted largely in her personal experiences as a Black woman in academia, a working mother who’d completed her dissertation at the height of the pandemic; an occasional poet and aspiring novelist—and, like Ms. Wei, someone many of us felt we could rely on. Someone who, through the chaos of COVID and the academic and social upheaval that accompanied it, helped us stay afloat. Someone who was kind enough to provide guidance not only in required office hours sessions (where I panicked over capstone project deadlines and had a minor identity crisis), but in situations outside of her class (where her own knowledge of fandom culture and intersectional feminist approaches to academic writing provided a much-needed perspective that other professors didn’t have).

Our major, the writing and literature major, consisted of a vibrant and relatively diverse population of students, many of whom were LGBTQ+, disabled, neurodivergent, and/or people of color. Often, we found ourselves clashing with faculty who did not look like us, did not understand us or our experiences, and, despite their best attempts, could not connect with us. In Michelle, we found an ally, an advocate. We found someone whose very presence challenged the norms of higher education, who knew the significance of her position and used her power to bridge the gap between us and the university, to not only put a face to the system that felt so inscrutable but to provide us a voice to communicate our concerns to that system, to amplify them. To make sure we were heard.

Not everyone is lucky enough to have a Michelle in their corner. Unable (or unwilling) to seek support from professors who seem untouchable (or maybe just out of touch), many students find it in their TAs—graduate students who understand the struggle of juggling school and work and who often experience the same struggles with housing and finances as many undergrads—or even in their upperclassmen. My friend Izzie, for instance, was the LGBTQ+ liaison for Undergraduate Diversity and Inclusion in Physics, a club designed to foster a safer, more welcoming environment for marginalized students in a major dominated by cishet white men—a field of study where professors were often either oblivious to the traumatizing conditions their students faced or, worse, directly responsible for perpetuating harm. Our graduate and undergrad peers may not have all the resources as our professors, but their ability and willingness to empathize with our struggles can make them equally important mentors.

In environments where we are often reduced to little more than names on lists, faces in crowds, and numbers in systems, having someone willing to commit time and energy to not only our academic success, but our emotional well-being can make an immense difference. And while our paths may lead us elsewhere once our schooling has ended, that doesn’t mean we have to put our relationships with these mentors to rest. We continue to seek their guidance, their compassion, their understanding—and their company. (When life gets you down, sometimes you gotta go out for boba with your high school English teacher at 8 pm on a Thursday night.)

So here’s to the emotional support educators—K-12 teachers, college professors, underpaid and overworked TAs, and even the students—who take us under their wing. Who sees us, who hears us, who uplifts us.

We see you. We hear you. And we thank you.