hi! i might take her for one of my majors this year. was wondering if do you have any feedback on her orrr wjsjwksaw
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Hi! I don't know why she doesn't get reviewed much since she has been teaching here forever, but as her beadle this sem, I have a very...complicated relationship with her. Hahaha.
No, she is not A-able. I have yet to receive my final grade from her, but she gives B+ by default for weekly one-page reports on her readings (which is 50% of the overall grade), but most of her students do rather poorly on her exam...which I found quite easy, so I didn't quite understand why. But suffice to say she is, by her own admission, life-changing and QPI-changing. It can be discouraging to always get B+ (4.5/5) on her reports, but to her, A must be perfect. And with 50+ years of experience in feminist organising I get why "perfect" is a high bar. She says she gives the exact same grade and grades highly because it's designed as a counterweight to poor exam scores.
In terms of course content and design, it's generally representative of second-wave ideas, a new subject every week (e.g. prostitution, then porn, then migration, etc.). The content ranges from groundbreaking, things that really change your whole view on things, like wow I never really thought of incest/domestic work/erotica/fashion that way before, to...um...how do I say, TERFy? She's kind of a TERF. And her lessons sometimes make that clear. But she is apparently learning. I just want to make that clear because that sometimes slips into how she teaches and she tends to talk about gender relations with little reference to queer and trans people, and she also straight-up holds some transphobic ideas and misgenders trans public figures.
Sometimes she blurts these things out in casual conversation. As a trans student she was very respectful to me though. But I am privileged by passing, and I had several moments where she expressed something weirdly out of pocket and I just mentally went "Wow, in what way did I seem like a good person to express this to???" So, yeah, just a warning if you're trans and a student of hers.
You need a good beadle. She can be disorganized at times; her calendar is a bit confusing and requires interpretation by your beadle and confirmation from her that the interpretation is accurate. She plans for a specific module and oral presentation by students (corresponding to the written reports, one student per week) to happen in each week but, naturally, suspensions happen and she has issues with her health so classes get cancelled and the calendar gets shifted around. So you need your beadle to help communicate with her about the schedule. If your beadle is falling behind, please don't be upset. I felt a lot more like a personal secretary to her than a beadle, taking on a lot of responsibilities, and she had very little patience for when I was confused or misunderstood her scheduling. So do go easy on your beadle!
She can be a bit blunt, brash, and unaware of personal boundaries. She has straight-up told me she isn't fond of certain students, for example. She's very honest about who she thinks is and isn't very bright. One time I did my nails and when I came up to her she literally grabbed them to look at them and be like "Whoa what is that?!?!". (I had 3d stickers). It's funny but if you can't take a prof whose understanding of boundaries and when it is and isn't acceptable to make offhanded negative comments about others is identical to your grandmother's, you won't like her class.
You couldn't pay me to take another class by her ever again. That was a headache. But I had fun and I learned a lot. We also all went to Gino's after the exam and that induced some Stockholm syndrome. But yeah, never again probably. To be transparent, she's asked me to put a good word in for her on profs to pick, buuuut I just have to be honest. Sorry.