My name is Mx. Westley (Syd Westley), and I graduated from Hamlin in 2013. For high school, I attended The Branson School in Ross, where I was captain of the soccer team and student body co-president. After graduating from Branson in 2017, I went to Stanford University. I just completed my third year at Stanford where I am majoring in Comparative Literature and minoring in Comparative Studies of Race and Ethnicity. I am currently taking the year off of school in order to teach at Hamlin, and next year I will return to Stanford to graduate! After that, I plan on pursuing an MFA in creative writing in order to become a poetry professor at the college level.

Because of COVID-19, I was not very excited about beginning my senior year of college in distance learning, so I decided to look for teaching opportunities for the year and was lucky enough to stumble upon this alumni fellowship! Because I want to pursue teaching after college, I thought it would be a great opportunity to get some more experience and professional development skills in the field, and I also just thought it would be very fun to return to my alma mater (which it has been). I am teaching alongside many of my old teachers and, although it has been a bizarre adjustment to start calling them by their first names, it has been really fun and interesting and fulfilling.

In my new role, I mostly support fifth grade students in math, language arts, and Spanish. I am also one of the faculty co-sponsors for the Middle School GSA (Gender and Sexuality Alliance) which has been my favorite part of the job. As a queer and non-binary person who had none of these resources when I was in middle school, I am so excited to share my experience/resources with students and to begin normalizing they/them pronouns as well as the gender neutral title, Mx. (pronounced Mix). Distance learning has proven challenging for everyone (I now have experienced it both as a student and as a teacher), so I’m very happy to provide the extra support. The students are so lovely, and I’ve never held a job I loved this much before.