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Some of us fluctuate more than others, some of us take medications that reduces these fluctuations. Some of us have had experiences that result in feeling more lows, or more highs, compared to others. Whether I'm thinking about my own mental health, my students, or broadly, it's important to me to foster relationships and practices that responsively care for people where they're at on that spectrum of wellness, in ways that reduce rather than perpetuate harm.

University is hard enough already. On top of the demands of being a student (in this economy and geo-political climate), people come into the classroom with different afflictions, contexts, and resources. I don't want my teaching, grading, or support to students within my capacity as a TA, to make an already difficult journey feel less possible. Educational institutions don't have much empathy for disruption, yet disruption happening constantly. Students get sick, hurt, they have migraines, they have to go home suddenly, they have to go to the ER and wait for 12 hours to be seen, have to stay home to care for themselves or family members. Pandemics happen, genocides are happening, and political tensions are crowding around already tenuous brain chemical assemblages under a global system of white supremacist capitalist ableist patriarchy. People experience dire financial crises, or have to go to a scheduled shift at work instead of class because they want to pay their rent that month (a very common reason cited by students regarding absence, when asked from a relational standpoint rather than a punitive one). When students arrive at the classroom, despite all these challenges, the last thing I want to do is make the coursework more difficult. When they submit an assignment, the last thing I want to do is make that experience of getting feedback/a grade another wound to recover from.

I've been so fortunate to have educators and other mentors in my own academic journey who have shown me how to foster this kind of radical, solidarity-based relationality between educators and students. For example, I start tutorials with 3-5 minutes of unstructured 'check-in' time (dependent on how chatty the group is) where I invite students to check in with each other, and go about whatever business they need to before the tutorial begins. I learned to do this from a professor during my undergraduate degree (when we were online during the height of COVID-19). I tell my students that I recreate this practice because, as that educator shared with me, the demands of being in university don't leave us much room to care for each other, or ourselves. This practice show students that I trust them to trust themselves, and unstructured, non-transactional relationality is possible within the walls of the institution. I also want to help ease the feeling of isolation that I know they are feeling (as a graduate student and recent-undergraduate student), as students who know how to navigate a Zoom class but don't have a lot of opportunities to talk to their peers without an agenda, or find solidarities within the frenzy of surviving university. As an educator, whose responsibility is to lead that tutorial for 50 minutes, it's important to me to create a space for that, however brief.

--- Elizabeth Cameron