TA Uncomfortable Being Referred to as Teacher’s “Companion”

An already-rough semester took a turn for the worse this week for psychology teaching assistant and Florida State junior Michelle Lamp. After being forced to write “swipe left if I’m your TA” in her Tinder bio, Lamp was super-liked by nearly all of the 5’6” men in the PSY2012 class where she monitors the attendance sheet. The already uncomfortable situation escalated when tenured professor Richard Mason informed his class Wednesday that he wouldn’t be present at their exam on Friday, but that his “lovely companion, Michelle” would fill in.

“I can’t believe this happened,” stuttered a shellshocked Lamp as she pulled her turtleneck back up over her face between sentences. “As soon as Dr. Mason called me his ‘companion,’ my blood ran cold and I could literally feel Simone De Beauvoir rolling in her grave. I’m grading papers for Mason to get a letter of recommendation for law school, not to appeal to his weird old man fantasies and be belittled in front of a class of my peers.”

“When Dr. Mason said that, a shiver of disgust ran down my spine. I threw up outside of the college of medicine after class,” claimed student and witness to the incident Rachelle Tozier, who started wearing horse blinders to class to avoid eye contact with all men. “It’s already hard enough for women to be taken seriously as professionals. Her job as a TA is to pass out Scantrons and sit quietly at the front of the room on her Macbook while the professor lectures and uses her as an example of what a successful former student of the class looks like. She’s not obligated to be the subject of ugly pet names.”

Lamp has prepared a 14 slide PowerPoint Presentation aggressively titled “MICHELLE LAMP, TEACHER’S ASSISTANT” in order to clear up the situation. When she returns to the lower-level psychology class full of people with “probably double majoring in Communications and Psychology” written on their LinkedIn Profiles from high school, she plans to refer to herself in only the third person including the prefix ‘teacher’s assistant’ before her name.