Three years ago, I was laid off from an underpaid adjunct job at a (frankly really really toxic) college because I gave my students flexibility & compassion that other profs didn't think those student deserved. They found it suspicious struggling students did well in my classes.

At this college, the department chair told me our students "weren't graduate school material" and that I should "manage their expectations." Several of my students went on to get advanced degrees in psychology and to publish research.

One professor at this college hated that I gave students extensions for things like having panic attacks or having to go to therapy following an on-campus sexual assault. She was visibly hostile to me for being "easy" on people who were abjectly suffering.

Another colleague asked that I give him all my assignments and tests, so he could figure out why so many students were scoring so highly on them. He concluded there was nothing wrong with my tests. "just dont be so specific on your study guides" he said. That would lower scores.

They sat in on my classes and gave me glowing teaching reviews. The students really appreciated me -- or at least the ones who did were very vocal about it. But I was kind and flexible and visibly queer and gave people good grades who had trouble in other classes, so I was out.

I found it outrageous that my colleagues at this college saw our students as lazy, undeserving of compassion, doomed to fail. So I wrote an essay about it. It has reached 3 million people.

And tomorrow, the book that grew from that essay is out everywhere. I felt so professionally and spiritually lost when I was fired for trying to be a caring professor. a few years later, I know I'm at least reaching more people than that tiny evangelical college in chicago does.

The Laziness Does Not Exist essay talks a lot about students who've been mistreated by professors, but I never named names in that piece about where I saw it happening the most often, and the most brazenly. If you live in Chicago this thread is probably enough to figure it out

I've always wanted to drag the school publically because not only was it a place hostile to students with mental health struggles and trauma, it was a homophobic and racist place as well. But i've always held off... I'm not sure why. Teaching there was so heartbreaking.

Every good thing I've ever done in my life has come from post-traumatic growth. I'm glad I had a terrible experience there because I learned a lot about how the world is, and for a time I got to be a source of comfort for students who were told they were lazy or crazy or failures

Some of them, at least. The students who trusted me enough to open up and ask for help. I'm sure there were so many I missed, and people who I didn't earn the trust of who suffered in silence. That was very much the institutional norm.

Anyway, I'm feeling very reflective and emotional today, and really grateful. Thank you to everyone who has ever messaged me telling me that essay touched you. And also I'm sorry you were so mistreated that you needed an essay like that. I hope someday life is different.