I once had an eleven-year-old tell me he didn’t know that boys were allowed to like reading. He was sitting in our virtual classroom with his Golden State Warriors jersey on. “Not only are boys allowed to like reading,” I said to him, “they are allowed to like reading and be good at sports.” I told him how I practiced basketball every day before school to make the varsity team and how reading helped alleviate some of the pressure I placed on myself to be good at sports. At the end of the program, his mother told me it was the first time that he had ever enjoyed a class, the first time that he had ever done his homework. 

Another time, a particularly shy seventh grade student who struggled to speak in class showed me a book she was reading outside of the assigned material. It was a serious book about World War 2, unlike our class reading that engaged with more playful topics such as homework machines and soccer games. As she told me about the book, her eyes lit up. She was so excited—she had forgotten all about being reserved and shy. As class went on, this excitement found its way into the classroom and she managed to share out in front of her peers.

These experiences from my first time teaching were so profoundly moving that I developed a deep desire to make teaching more than a hobby, or a career even— I wanted to make it my vocation.

I’ve always felt like one of my gifts has been to see the best in people, and it was this attribute that led me to apply for that first teaching job, a remote gig in the summer of 2023 teaching reading and writing to kids in K-12. The broad range of ages was a challenge—but I quickly learned that there is a large amount of overlap when it comes to teaching kindergarteners and high schoolers. The biggest difference I noticed was the older students just needed a little bit more coaxing before being playful and expressive in the classroom. 

I believe that at the core of every learning environment there exists a community. Learning is relational; whether it is with a class of four-year-olds or college students, everyone in the classroom plays a vital role and has something to contribute. At the core of the teacher’s mission is to foster a sense of community and belonging, to teach students not just to engage with content and ideas, but to teach them how to generate ideas as both individuals and as a part of a group. Establishing good classroom norms with students is a great way to start to achieve a collective sense of belonging. 

Some of the things that I was taught to do in a K-12 classroom translated quite easily into my classroom of college students come fall 2023. The prospect of leading three 55 minute recitations a week in a data science course created a lot of anxiety for me. My first concern was that the students would recognize I had only just graduated college and form a collective rebellion against me because of my youth. My second fear was that they would realize I was learning how to code the class material roughly two weeks before I was teaching it to them. My solution to the second fear was simple: transparency. On the first day of class, I told the students I was no expert in data science, but I fancied myself an expert learner. And I believed that I could not only help them learn data science, but to learn how to learn better as well.

Oddly enough, they didn’t rebel. And even more oddly, I believe my lack of expertise in the field served as a benefit for the students. All pretenses of expertise out the window, students were comfortable struggling in front of me, asking me for help. My recent learning of the material situated me nicely—I knew what they were struggling with on a more visceral level. This first experience of in-person teaching continued to encourage me to pursue it as a vocational path.

In the spring of 2024, I served as a TA for an American Literature course, and in the last month of the school year, I got to design the syllabus and structure for the class. I became the sole-teacher for a select group of students, and Dr. Martin Bickman served as my mentor. My class had roughly ten students who were all relatively talkative, so I designed the class to function primarily as a small group discussion. Reading Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, we talked about themes regarding modern communication technologies. Not only did we discuss them, but we engaged in experiential forms of learning where the students tested out things we were discussing in class utilizing their phones. One such experiment was to have everyone turn on their ringers and let notifications pour in and interrupt our discussion: this was intended to demonstrate split-attention in the modern era. This was my first opportunity to select the class content and organize the structure of the class. 

In the summer of 2024, my good fortunes continued as I earned the position as an instructor for three classes in CU Boulder’s Upward Bound program. This program is a federal TRIO program designed to help students from underprivileged backgrounds. The CU chapter primarily serves Native American populations. Teaching two sections of Senior Writing and one section of Science Fiction and Fantasy, I created my own syllabi and grading structures. I was the sole teacher in the classroom without any faculty mentor this time. 

Coming into the experience, I believed the biggest difficulty would be working with students with a vastly different background than my own and one another—the Navajo and the Pueblos are not a monolithic culture. This actually didn’t prove all that difficult; we established a classroom community and developed norms around mutual respect and encouragement. 

What proved the greater challenge was adapting my syllabi. My students came into the program with an incredibly diverse level of reading and writing ability, and this challenge was difficult for me at the start. I had to quickly adapt to meet the students where they were at. Moreover, I had to find solutions to working with students in one classroom who were in far different places on their reading and writing journeys. In Sci-Fi/Fantasy, I saw students come to life through the screenplays they produced in groups. In Senior Writing, I saw students tell their own stories in their college application essays, noticing a striking improvement across their drafts. This experience was so meaningful and I hope to continue teaching with Upward Bound in the summer of 2025.

All of these experiences led me to my current position at CU Boulder’s Center for Teaching and Learning, where upon faculty request, I observe their classroom over several weeks and provide them with feedback on their teaching. This experience not only enables me to encourage inclusive pedagogy and active-learning around campus, but affords me with the ability to observe numerous tenure-track, lifelong teachers across several disciplines. These observations have helped me further develop my pragmatic ideas for my own classrooms moving forward, as well as mold my teaching philosophy which continues to guide me along my teaching journey.