I'm quite certain Professor Tuttle is brilliant--he is immensely knowledgable, and is fluent in AT LEAST 6 languages. I'm sure his academic papers are incredibly well written and well recieved. That said, he is a TERRIBLE professor--lecturing not in any pattern but in a series of tangents totally unconnected to the class. He gave us the readings in archaic spanish, old german and french (this is for an Italian class), and once spent 20 minutes reading to us in Latin, then expected students to answer his questions about what he'd just read. He expects us all to be so well studied as he is, and seems perplexed when noone can answer his questions. Don't get me wrong--he's very nice, and an easy grader, so while you'll have no idea what the course was on, you'll still do well. I would be hard pressed to think of two lectures he gave which had anything really to do with the course material--he seemed more interested in talking about the roots of Italian words (the topic of his other class this quarter) than about midieval literature (the topic of our class). He is an incredibly disorganized lecturer, and while a commanding speaker, makes it very painful to sit through his lectures.