“I love you.”
The words stumbled out. Panicked, I backed away slowly, almost tripping over the leg of the metal chair behind me. Surrounded by walls covered in Virginia state maps, pictures of Aztec houses and cubbies filled with colorful lunch boxes, I decided my school days were over. I had just accidentally committed the greatest sin possible for an 8-year old — I told my third grade teacher, “I love you.”
After coming from a series of small private schools, it was jarring to begin my academic experience at U.Va. not face-to-face with a beloved teacher, but in a classroom of 500 students wearing sweatpants and clicking through their best friend’s cousin’s wedding album or checking SportsCenter updates. I didn’t even know the professor’s first name at the end of the semester.
School itself has often felt like an afterthought at college. “How’s your day going?” elicits anecdotes about extracurriculars or concert tickets for the weekend. If academics are mentioned, it is within the context of complaining about a useless group project or too much reading from a droning textbook.
“The biggest part of college is definitely not in classes,” my roommate says over a cup of lukewarm coffee. She’s echoed by BuzzFeed articles, tour guides — and first-year me.
Perhaps the most valuable education this University has given me occurred outside the classroom. Maybe true learning happens in the afternoon spent speeding around Skyline Drive, or in-between glasses of questionably dated white wine. The spontaneity of last minute road trips to hot springs, learning to pay bills and Mellow Mushroom trivia are the most useful training for something as mysterious and elusive as adulthood.
And yet, to obscure the effect my professors have had would be a disservice to their passion, their challenging questions, their encouragement. To render a picture of my education at college without them would be an incomplete, gray-scale portrait. I write the following simply to offer a few, inadequate words of gratitude.
My thanks go to the mentors who showed me text can breathe and smell and sweat. To those who taught me the origins of words like “bittersweet” and “crepuscular;” who challenged me to take sexual assault statistics and my gender-violence articles out of the classroom.
My gratitude goes to the professors who cultivated my joy in spending an hour walking through Alderman stacks, thumbing through musty collections of incarceration rates in Bangladesh, translations of “Othello” in three romance languages or a history of punk musicals. To the teachers who advised me in the Globe Theater in London, over Skype while my research team and I wrote interview questions in Phnom Penh, and, though not as dramatically, in cluttered Monroe offices.
These words are for the teacher who looked around a class of 29 students in New Cabell one grey and foggy Wednesday and asked us, during a discussion of race-constructionism, “What was really wrong with Rachel Dolezal?”
This article is for my professor who, each week, leads a group of jittery students past armed security guards and invasive pat-downs into Beaumont Correctional Center. We follow him across a spare and empty concrete court into a room filled with boys our age in matching colored polo shirts. For an hour and a half a week, we read Russian literature together. We talk about our families, our dreams for the rest of our twenties, the one food we could never give up. Last week, one of the residents turned to me, and pointed at my professor.
“You’re so lucky to have someone care that much about your education,” he said.
As midterms draw closer and it grows increasingly difficult to find a seat in Alderman, remind me at 4 a.m. the night before my thesis is due how blessed I am to go to office hours or how lucky I am to be this stressed. Remind me I ought to sing praises while I sit in an uncomfortable chair in a too-crowded lecture because I am listening to someone who is dedicated solely and passionately to helping me learn.
Remind me not to slip up like I did in third-grade phrase, but instead offer two simpler words — “thank you.”
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