The current study examines the author's work with four graduate Teaching Assistants (TAs) as they joined her to teach a graduate course at San Francisco State University. The author sought the Teaching Assistants' perspective on how to improve instruction in a course students consistently described as highly rigorous. To understand how she provided mentorship, the author looks at the work she and the TAs did together to plan and teach the course and at the TAs' response to this work. The findings demonstrate that students still found course demands to be quite high.