Professor Garro is a very knowledgable scholar, but an absolutely terrible lecturer.

Her lectures are mostly explanations of readings for that week, but her explanations were hard to follow due to her constant stuttering, lack of proper wording, and confusing use of quotes from readings. This accompanied with uninformative slides which often do not pertain to what she is saying, made listening to her feel more like a headache than a relief from understanding the class material. The lack of coherent structure in her lectures made it confusing to take lecture notes due to the frequent rubber banding between going back and going forward on content and concepts.

As for the material itself, there's 1 to 3 readings of 6 to 30 pages required per week from her own work published in the early 2000s or from older medical anthropologists' publications from the 1970s to 1990s. The contents of the material were not too hard to follow, but most of them included complex themes and concepts were often confusing and needed further explanation are severely lacking, as previously stated.

Lastly her attitude towards the class was supposedly very supportive and positive, according to the TA, but Garro's interaction with the class has mostly been absent or otherwise negative. In the earlier weeks of the class she used to ask questions but as the students answered her question, she would reply with an uninterested "Ok" until one student barely scratches the "right" answer which no one but her seemed to have been able to guess correctly. Other times, she would outright tell the student they are wrong or give a sarcastic answer of 'Is it?' while trying to speak over them without letting them finish their thought/answer. Unsurprisingly the students stopped participating in fear they would just be dismissed for attempting.

Overall, I would not recommend Garro. Her class has been the most unenjoyable experience I've had in my 4 years in UCLA. The content I've consumed from this class seemed to just turn me further towards disgust and annoyance about a topic that initially interested me due to its premise of understanding cultures' approach to medicine. Garro's teaching seemed to have entirely dismissed the objective truths we know about biomedicine while exoticising the non-Western approaches to medicine.

Professor Garro's class was by far the worst class I have taken in my academic career. First of all, I was extremely excited to take med anthro as I have been interested in this subject matter for a long time- Dr. Garro changed my approach to this field and I will not be coming back. Her workload is unbelievably heavy, unreasonably heavy. There are weeks where she assigns over 200 pages of material, on which there will be detailed questions (so, no, do not read the intro and the conclusion- a solution that her TA suggested). She is inaccessible outside of the classroom and it is apparent teaching is an inconvenience to her and a nuisance that is a side effect of her research work. She is a dry, boring, and confusing (impossible to follow) lecturer. Her TA suggested we were just not intelligent enough to understand her extremely complicated chain of thought, but I believe that truly intelligent people find a way to convey their knowledge, so we will have to disagree there. All in all, her exams are unfair, as she is so behind on the lecture material questions are asked on material that has never been discussed and her understanding of it is often much different than what would be expected. She offers no explanations, holds grades hostage (even after the work has been graded), for instance, we received final grades before any other grades were made available. I am convinced her only goal in life is to make students' lives a living hell.

Horribly disorganized. The subject was very interesting and some of the assigned readings were pretty insightful, but progression through material was markedly inconsistent- many things that were very important on the final and midterms were rushed through, while things that weren't as focused on took up most of the time. (See NO STUDY GUIDE...save for the hard fought for midterm study guide)

The grading rubrics for the assigned papers were also very unclear and seemed like they were worded to be more confusing than helpful- including information and questions that were not relevant to the points needing to be addressed.

Finally, the professor was very committed to her opinions on the material where it wasn't obvious what the "correct" answer was. Disagree AT YOUR OWN PERIL.

I may have gotten an A in the class and I trust that both the TA and Professor are good people, but I cannot in good conscience recommend this class to anyone.

I hate this class so much. It's so much work and if you're not interested in random native American/ Mexican medical practices like me don't take this class. She is so boring and her grading and prompts are so weird and unclear. Tests are really hard and she is very against study guides. Overall a boring waste of time and money; would not recommend

Do yourself a favor, don't take her. Her lectures are extremely unclear (they're powerpoints with paragraphs that have been copy pasted from the readings). She is not nice or understanding; she made a student cry in my class for asking a question. She said "thats a dumb question why would you even ask that??". Her TA, Stephanie, was honestly the only positive part of this entire experience. Hands down, Garro was the worst professor I have ever had.

The worst part about this class was the lack of clarity. I never really had a gauge of how much I needed to put into what aspects of the class, and many of the readings were dense and confusing. The tests were only hard because a lot of questions would be very specific, like "which author said this" or "what piece of work is this from". Her slides were pretty useful for the tests, but they were also literally just blocks of quotes. I stopped attending a lot of lectures towards the end and just reviewing the slides and I still ended up doing ok. The class structure was three 2-page reflection papers on a question from the readings, one midterm, one 6-8 page final paper, and one final. I just found it annoying that we had both a final paper and a final test, but both were graded very leniently so I guess that makes up for it.