I want to ask you something.
When you imagine a professor,
what do you see?
The office with the books.
The name on the door.
The CV that fills a page with permanence,
publication stacked on publication,
tenure arrived at,
the slow accretion of institutional belonging.
Now imagine the person
who teaches the ones who cannot come to campus.
The single mother in a town four hours away.
The man finishing his degree at fifty-three
because life finally has a sliver of room for it.
The student with a disability
that makes the physical campus
a place of negotiation rather than welcome.
The worker on shift who studies in the break room.
Someone teaches them.
Someone builds the course,
writes the welcome,
answers the email at ten at night,
reads the submission carefully,
writes the feedback that says:
I see what you are trying to do here.
Let me help you do it.
Someone does that work.
She has a short contract.
She has no office.
She works from wherever the work can happen.
She is reviewed annually.
She is grateful for the renewal.
She does not complain,
or she complains only in the places
where complaining cannot change the weather.
She has been doing this for twenty-five years.
She is not unusual.
She is the norm.
She is how distance education runs.
She is the infrastructure
no one puts on the letterhead.
I am asking you to see her.
La que enseña desde los márgenes merece estar en el centro de la historia.
The one who teaches from the margins deserves to be at the centre of the story.
