By Sterling Saint Rain, Mathematics Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2025 Odds are that you can relate to the experience of staring at a math assignment and having absolutely no clue where to start. Perhaps you’ve even participated in the decades-old tradition of exclaiming, “It’s all Greek to me!”…
By Matthew Easton, Political Science Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2025 Political science naturally lends itself to debate, disagreement, and even argument — it’s part of what makes the discipline so engaging. However, when I learned I’d be a GSI leading discussions on American politics during the Fall 2024…
By Xueqin Lin, School of Education Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2025 One of the challenges I encountered while teaching lab sessions for EDUC 293A: Data Analysis in Education Research in Fall 2025 was supporting students struggling with statistical software, particularly Stata. One student, who had no…
By Anahit Manoukian, Spanish and Portuguese Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2025 One of the most challenging aspects of teaching a second-semester reading and composition course is introducing students to secondary sources. When I designed my “Letters from the Hispanic World” course, I intentionally focused on primary texts to…
By Neel Modi, Physics Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2025 Physics, as a field of study, lives somehow at the intersection of two contradictory paradigms. On the one hand, it is highly abstract and technical–arguably one of the most math-heavy STEM fields you can choose to study in college.
By Ishani Chesire, Astronomy Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2025 It was a situation many GSIs are familiar with: following the first midterm in Astron 7B, a student approached me looking nervous and asked to talk about her grade. She had not done well in the midterm, but even…
By Kirsten Landsiedel, Biostatistics Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024 If you have ever taken a math class before, you likely have a readily available answer to the question: “Do you consider yourself a math person”? Perhaps someone answered this question for you, you labeled yourself one way…
By Yicheng Zhu, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024 How can we enhance student engagement and cultivate genuine interest? I asked myself this question before serving as a Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) for EE 113/213A: Power Electronics, an upper-division/graduate-level course centered around circuit…
By Karen Villegas, Education Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024 As an undergraduate student, I remember dreading group work and public presentations. As a doctoral candidate, I came to value the experience of collaborating on research projects and presenting our findings at academic conferences. There was something special…
By Darcy Tuttle, Ancient History & Mediterranean Archaeology Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024 Before taking their first college history course, many first-year students have limited experience engaging with primary sources and lack confidence critically evaluating secondary sources written by experts. For my R1B course, “Conversations with the…