Rookie of the Year: On Teaching History to Freshmen at 8am

September 2023 through June 2024. Eleanor Roosevelt College Academic Writing Program, UC San Diego — teaching Making of the Modern World, the same history survey sequence I had taken as a freshman and written papers for throughout undergrad. I won Best New TA. The students cried when class ended. I actually wrote a 13 page essay on a final exam during my first quarter and still finished 45 minutes early (ofc I got an A+) -- and my TA, who was a "peer" later on... said it was a memorable & fun experience.

There is a particular kind of full-circle that happens when you end up teaching the course you once sat in as a student, writing papers you now know were mostly good but occasionally embarrassing. Making of the Modern World — the sweeping global history survey that runs through Eleanor Roosevelt College's core curriculum — was the sequence I had written about colonialism, Empress Wu, the Bhagavad Gita, and the British Raj in, starting my freshman year (don't worry, I shared them here under 'Essays' so you can read and critique my early work). By the time I was standing on the other side of it, I had also TAed it, which meant I had an unusual amount of affection for the material and an equally unusual amount of clarity about where students typically got lost.

I taught 2&3pm sections in MMW 12 and 8& 9am sections in MMW 13. I want to be clear about what that means: these are freshmen, in their first quarter of college, at hours when most nineteen-year-olds are constitutionally incapable of intellectual engagement. And yet — nobody fell asleep. That is not a small thing -- and I didn't need to provide caffeine.

What made it work, I think, was that I treated the sections less like recitations of lecture content and more like genuine intellectual spaces. The course covers world history across centuries and civilizations, which gives you almost unlimited material to work with if you're willing to follow where students' curiosity actually goes rather than where the syllabus says it should. I came in with activities — group work, debates, structured discussions — but I also came in willing to abandon them if something more interesting was happening. My friend, who was also TAing the same sequence that year, and I coordinated across our sections, sharing what was working and what wasn't, designing group activities together, running joint office hours that turned into genuine conversations about how to teach rather than just what to teach.

The students found me approachable (in my opinion) in the way that good TAs need to be approachable — which is not the same as being their friend, but is adjacent to it. They were eighteen-ish, new to college, frequently overwhelmed, and looking for someone who would take their questions seriously without making them feel stupid for asking. I made sure I was that person. They came to office hours to talk about their papers and stayed to talk about their majors, their anxieties, their sense that they were supposed to have figured something out by now that nobody had actually told them. I gave them what I had: honest answers, appropriate perspective, and the consistent message that being uncertain and curious is not a liability in an academic setting — it's the whole point.

Not every student was a joy. Some were problems — the kind of student who makes a TA question whether patience is actually a virtue or just a thing people say when they can't think of a better response. That's part of it. You manage it, you document what needs documenting, you keep the room from being defined by the difficult ones.

But the majority were genuinely good — curious, engaged, willing to sit with hard historical questions and produce real ideas in response. I watched them figure out how to write an argument. I watched them discover that they had opinions about things they hadn't previously considered opinionated territory. I watched a few of them fall in love with history in the particular way that happens when someone presents it as a living set of questions rather than a settled record of events.

At the end of the year, some of them wrote paragraphs in their evaluations. Some cried when class was over.

I won Best New TA. I was not surprised, because I had worked very hard and cared very much, and those two things together tend to produce results. But I was genuinely moved by it, because the recognition came from my peers & bosses who had no obligation to feel anything about the experience and apparently felt a great deal.

That year taught me something about the relationship between expertise and teaching that I hadn't fully understood before: knowing the material is necessary but not sufficient. What actually reaches people is the combination of knowledge and genuine investment in whether they're getting it. The 8am slot was definitely a test of that every single week. I passed it, and so did they.