I completely agree with the previous poster - DO NOT TAKE SAMIR SONI as your T.A. He started off the first day saying that just because we may have received A's in other English classes at UCLA, we should not expect an A in English 10A. Well, excuse me, but getting an A is not just the student's responsibility, but also depends on the ability of the professors and teaching assistants and how well they teach. In any case, it was not a very encouraging way to start the quarter. I ended up dropping the class, but would have loved to stay in it because of the professor...she was really smart, funny and approachable. I thought she presented the material and made it fascinating and easy to understand.

A decent professor; she has a really dry sense of humor that nobody seems to get early in the morning, but my friend and I would usually chuckle at her jokes. At one point my friend said that a lot of what she says sounds like it comes from Sparknotes, and it's quite true; I don't think I ever glanced at my notes before the quizzes my TA gave, I just made sure to review the reading on Sparknotes. Can't say she made the reading a whole lot more enjoyable, but she was always pretty clear on what she thought were major themes in what we read, which was nice, as some other profs have a tendency to run circles around you and assume you know what the author thinks is so important about their own writing. The final was a series of explications (like 10 out of 12), and she emphasizes that what she expects you to write is a regurgitation of lecture if you can't afford the time to write something new and novel. Make sure you know all the historical background of the works for the final, like date, author, context, genre, characteristics of that genre, how the work is representative of that genre, etc. Major hand crampage occurred, but the passages were mostly easily identified and manageable.

But I hated my TA. If you wind up taking a section with Samir Soni in anything... Get out while you can. The man HATES giving out A's, and he's really, really vague and unhelpful during conferences. Plus sections were almost entirely him talking; there was very little actual discussion of material. I had the chance to get out at the beginning of the quarter to even out discussions; I sorely regret not having jumped at that opportunity. He said at one point, after we'd lost three or four people, that he thought students had dropped because of the reading material, which at the time was Canterbury Tales. He said he didn't think people dropped because of him. AHAHA.