Professors sent students encouraging words, inspiring poetry – and determination

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story was originally published in the November issue of GCU Magazine, available in the purple bins on campus or digitally.

Michelle Ray’s poem, “The Online Professor,” is a heartfelt thank you and begins like this: “He logs in …” and the virtual room “fills with quiet gravity …”

Its origins were connected to two College of Education online professors and their two students at Grand Canyon University, the tribute telling of the power of words, kindness, resiliency and their ripple effect.

It started six years ago with Matt Pomrenke of Jacksonville, Florida. The former addict was desperate to straighten out his life and enrolled in online courses at GCU. But he had doubts that he could make it.

Until he got an email from his professor, Jesse Prather, who told of his own struggles growing up with an addicted mother and overcoming obstacles. He wrote encouragement to Pomrenke to stick with it: “I have developed an incredibly strong ‘sense’ about students that are going to graduate. Over the years, I have been right almost 100% of the time. I want you to know I believe you will be one that graduates and does great things after you are done with school.”

Prather said he lets students know he is a real person, no faceless entity on a laptop, and assures them that many don’t come from an easy background, but they can do it.

“I had never received anything like it before,” Pomrenke said. “… This email, as simple as it was, set an expectation of myself and what I can do.”

Pomrenke often went back to the words, kept them in his heart, when he struggled. Through every step through the years, he wrote an email to Prather to thank him for that moment that kept him going, through his bachelor’s degree and, last April, through his master’s degree at GCU in addiction counseling.

When the pair shared this on the university’s GCU News website in early August, another online professor received emails suggesting he should read it.

“Fine, I’ll read Jesse’s story,” David Larson muttered to himself, and after doing so thought, “Man, I need to be better.”

“I teach 108 (UNV-108: University Success, an introductory course) and you get six, seven students asking questions, and I give them essentials, thinking I don’t have time for more. But I thought, ‘I’m going to do better,’ and the first email that popped up on my screen?

“OK, let’s help Michelle.”

Michelle Ray was born premature, suffered health problems and was placed in special education while growing up with parents who were substance abusers, she said. She endured a troublesome marriage before a divorce left her nearing 40 with five children, three jobs and doubts her life would ever get better.

But she remembered one teacher in her early years who had believed in her so thought that she, too, could turn one of her jobs as a paraprofessional aide into making a difference as a teacher. Ray enrolled earlier this year at GCU for an education degree, “but I felt like I was too dumb.”

On that early August day, she had written an email to her first professor, David Larson, that she had just lost out on her job as a classroom aide when they discovered her TikTok account with 80,000 followers, where she often shared her personal life.

“I’m not sure if I’ll continue pursuing this path, but I do know I am not a terrible person,” she wrote to him.

Larson read it, fresh off his new inspiration, and responded that it didn’t sound like she was given due process and told her the times he was overlooked for jobs but felt he was qualified.

“Then the job that I didn’t know I needed for me and my family kinda fell into my lap, and I’ve been teaching at GCU for the past 12 years,” Larson wrote. “ All this to say that I wouldn’t let one administrator’s (or board’s) opinion of you keep you from pursuing your calling and passion. Maybe the right school, with the right team, and the right administrators, are praying to find you right now.”

Ray wrote back: “I want to thank you for the post earlier today. It encouraged me so much and restored my faith in humans. … I have been in a dark place, but I genuinely feel God led me to this school. Initially, I was going to stop after this class because I didn’t think I could handle online school…”

Then along came Larson and his encouraging words.

“He took the time to listen,” Ray said from her home in Pueblo, Colorado. “His soul is so kind. It was the spirit of God that I felt.”

That’s when she sat down, as she has since childhood, to write out her feelings. She sent the poem to Larson.

“He sees potential where others see struggle/listens where others lecture …”

Larson said he coined the exchange “the Prather Ripple Effect.”

And senior online faculty chair Dr. Sheila Damiani agreed, saying that the exchanges show how encouraging words can inspire confidence and assure students that they belong.

“These two stories, woven together, really showcase how the smallest gestures from faculty can ripple outward in ways we may never see at first,” she said.

Larson said he would always keep the poem that ended like this:

“Across time zones and muted microphones,

he reaches each student

leaving a mark

not in grades alone

but in the fire he lights within them

an unshakable belief

that they, too, could change the world.”

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GCU News senior writer Mike Kilen can be reached at [email protected].