Professor Fisher has a fair degree of knowledge within the field of medieval literature, however he treats certain students incredibly condescendingly, with precedent of expressing derision of mockery towards them in class for asking questions he considers too basic. Professor Fisher also struggles to effectively explain or couch core concepts to the English discipline like how to do a close reading or analyze/read Middle/Old English texts with students in office hours who are struggling with the course. He also generally has a disorganized lecture style. In general, Professor Fisher may be knowledgable about his specialization, but his professional demeanor and inability to effectively support students who are new/not naturally adept at tackling core texts/questions in the field decisively limits his capacity as an educator. Various students I know who took courses with him, alongside myself, found his teaching style to be discouraging, ineffective, and at times patronizing. Truly, raw knowledge is not at all enough to make one an effective or even respectful instructor, particularly for non-traditional and commuting students like myself and peers who succeeded in spite of him.

I did not expect to enjoy or do well in this class because medieval literature is very challenging for me but Professor Fisher understands how students feel about this kind of material and makes things manageable and engaging. This was after a year online and he was very understanding about that as well. There was a creative project which was fun to do and helped with the understanding of the material, and then essays which were fairly graded. When you have to take a medieval literature class, I recommend taking it with Fisher.

I did not expect to enjoy or do well in this class because medieval literature is very challenging for me but Professor Fisher understands how students feel about this kind of material and makes things manageable and engaging. This was after a year online and he was very understanding about that as well. There was a creative project which was fun to do and helped with the understanding of the material, and then essays which were fairly graded. When you have to take a medieval literature class, I recommend taking it with Fisher.

The previous Bruinwalk reviews made me nervous to take this class, and for the most part I found them accurate. Fisher is an engaging and often funny lecturer (he no longer holds a coffee cup), and he is approachable in office hours. The final exam and Middle English quiz are also straightforward; they are really not trying to trick you. However, the TAs are much more lenient with grading than Fisher; if he happens to grade your paper, he will most likely give it a C. I'm not sure what you can do to avoid this; I went to my TA's and Fisher's office hours before every assignment to talk about my ideas before I started writing, but I also suspect my TA graded my papers. Discussions were very short (50 mins) and we mostly practiced writing specific parts of an essay (introduction, body paragraph, conclusion) in groups. In terms of specific assignments, the Gallery Project consists of finding and presenting objects related to one text (it's basically making a museum exhibit on Google Slides). The grade distribution was: first paper (4 pages): 20%, Middle English Quiz: 5%, second paper (5-6 pages): 25%, Gallery Assignment: 15%, final: 15%, weekly Reading Responses (short paragraphs): 5%, and discussion participation: 15%. The final had 3 parts: identification, where you were given about 10 quotes and had to identify 3 Old English and 3 Renaissance quotes with the name, author, year published, and significance of the quote; a close reading essay (you are given a passage from one of the texts); and a long essay where you choose between two prompts about broad themes that Fisher has discussed throughout the quarter and use 3 texts to answer it, one of which must be Paradise Lost. KEEP UP WITH THE READINGS! It will benefit you greatly for the identification part of the final, and the long books of Paradise Lost do unfortunately occur in the last week before finals. Overall, this class required the most work simply in terms of the volume of texts we had to read (note: you do not have to absorb much of History of the Holy War or other strictly historical texts; for those Fisher often spent most of lecture going over historical context rather than the actual text). Personally, English literature to 1700 was not my favorite topic as an English major, but in hindsight I'm glad that I read some of the texts, and it helped me understand that people before 1700 were also just people. Seek out help from your TA and Fisher for the papers, and make friends in your discussion.

I wasn't crazy about the readings for this class, but there are very few people who actually like literature from this era. Professor Fisher is one of those few. His lectures are engaging and he's funny, but I agree with the comments calling him pretentious. I personally can't stand when professors are annoyingly condescending all the time so I avoided going to his office hours (although I know others who did had positive experiences with him one-on-one) and just went through my TA. He is definitely a harsh grader, so if you have one of your essays graded by him instead of your TA, good luck preparing for the final. The Middle English quiz was easy, but it counts for so little of your grade that it hardly even matters. The final was the most stressful three hours of my life. I'm glad I passed this class but it definitely tanked my GPA. If you can avoid taking this class with Fisher, do it. But if not, good luck.

Professor Fisher is a tremendous addition to the UCLA English Department's staff. He is really outgoing and it makes studying Medieval Literature a lot more enjoyable. I really appreciated the fact that this class was research based so it allowed students to come up with their own takeaways from the readings, research some topics about it, and learn about some interesting trends from the Medieval Era in the process. Overall, the class is hard because it is Middle English and it is Chaucer. However, I seriously have no regrets taking this class. I have gained an appreciation for Medieval Literature from it and Professor Fisher is incredibly passionate about the subject. On top of the fact that he is also funny, he is very understanding and genuinely wants to see his students succeed. If you need to take your Medieval Literature requirement, don't hesitate to take it with Professor Fisher. It won't be an unbearable 10 weeks, it will actually be enjoyable, and Professor Fisher really brings great energy to the class environment despite it being a more "difficult" course.

I absolutely hated this class and would not recommend it. This class had one six-page paper (with a minimum of ten sources), a weekly discussion post (all the way into finals week), a presentation, and another seventeen to twenty-page paper (min: fifteen sources) that was overall hell, along with long readings + supplemental readings almost weekly. You could tell the professor was passionate about his field but he was not good or experienced at working/teaching undergrads and was probably used to dealing with more experienced graduation students judging by the amount of coursework he assigned to us and little to no instruction. The classes hardly discussed readings and were more focused on him empathizing with us and the difficulty of research rather than actually focusing on class topics or instruction. And when he did focus on readings it addressed the eccentricity of it, and I failed to see how it might relate to class.

Assignments were increasingly frustrating and by the end, my classmates and I were frustrated and mentally done with the content and instruction of the class. He explained he was purposefully vague with all his instructions but this made papers and presentations frustrating and I often struggled to see how assigned readings were related at all to the class topic. Unfortunately, while the professor was passionate and showed empathy it was ultimately canceled out by the amount of coursework, difficulty of topics/assignments and lack of instruction he failed to give us.

So overall I would advise dodging this class if you can.

Although Professor Fisher is very clearly knowledgeable about the subject at hand (and has a lot of clout as a medievalist), his pedagogical style leaves so, so much to be desired. For a bit of background, I took this class as an upperclassman transfer student with an AA, meaning I am absolutely no stranger to the heavy analysis and sometimes tedious reading level that the English major requires at any school. The way that Prof. Fisher taught his class was perplexing, at best. Firstly, any reviews that mention that he more or less speaks in riddles is painstakingly accurate-- he was incredibly hard to follow at nearly all times. He often devolved into asking abstract questions in place of elucidating what any particular reading was about, relevant themes, or anything else you might expect out of a lecture. It seemed as though he delighted in perplexing students, or in unleashing the most esoteric jargon possible to unsuspecting and probably unlearned freshmen. Medieval texts are confusing in and of themselves, right? Normally a student might expect to attend lecture after a particularly hard read and be greeted with analysis and perhaps some clarity from the professor. In this class, I would routinely leave class more perplexed and confused on the material than I was going in. He would take the most esoteric and short poem (hardly written in English) and ask questions like "How long is water hot?" I get that. I get leaning on metaphors and questions in order to have students brainstorm, however, when it is the ONLY thing you are doing as an instructor, it sort of calls your pedagogical style into question.

In terms of the actual class content, there was so much left to be desired. I understand that AI is more or less poking massive holes into best practices, and I do not in any way think that it was unfair for essays to be completed in class due to this issue. HOWEVER, what this professor expected was ridiculous, unfair, and overly pedantic. I will not bore anyone with too much detail on what he expects, but suffice it to say that the way he forces students to submit to his level of close reading is ridiculous. He expects you to zero in on word choice and almost nothing else and to base arguments off of this alone. Any broader reading is punished. If you did only this for any other class, you would seem ridiculous and pedantic to the professor. Other than that, focusing on a single word leaves so much rich analysis out. To close read only in this way is to cut yourself off at the knees as an English major. It was quite unfair of him to force students to submit to this very narrow and one-trick way of generating ideas and to punish anything outside these lines. His expectations, other than what he expected in close reading, were never clear until grades came out. It was very hard to tell what exactly he was even looking for, and never really elucidated any further on expectations or what he hoped you might learn from any given story or even the course at large. Also, to hand out passages for annotation for exams without any expectation on what we are annotating for or any themes to look for is, again, just not a good practice. It just stresses students out and is incredibly tedious. Half the time I found that I didn't annotate anything on theme and had to make my theses on the fly and hope it stuck.

It became abundantly clear at a certain point that students were just not doing well. Although my assessment grades never dipped below a B, after any grades came back there was a gloomy aura in the lecture hall, and TAs would constantly remind the class that backsliding was normal, low grades were normal, and the professor agreed with this. He did not seem to care that anyone was struggling, and instead seemed a bit proud in a way, though I could be wrong as he was generally affable no matter the subject.

Even though the TAs gave good moral support, there was a very clear divorce between their pedagogical styles and the class content. Our TA often did not extend what we were being "taught" in lecture but instead gave us test survival strategies, ways to avoid incurring low grades, gave lessons on seemingly unrelated material that was, again, only of interest to the TA's interests. Interestingly, our TA once let it slip that he did not agree whatsoever with Fisher's teaching style, and that he bent the rules for our section and gave us more guidance than Fisher had wanted. That alone is totally ridiculous. If your TAs are going rogue against you and instructing students on how to avoid low grades, you are doing something wrong as a professor.

Although I learned meager tidbits about medieval literature, I did learn a great deal from this course-- namely that just because someone is a genius, it doesn't make them a great lecturer or even a good teacher of their knowledge, and that sometimes to get the grade you have to act like a pony doing a rehearsed trick.

I personally did not enjoy this course whatsoever. In fact, I came into this class with the hopes of becoming an English minor, but unfortunately, I had to change the grading to P/NP to conserve my GPA. After all, this is a lower-division course.
Indeed, the majority of these reviews hit the nail on the head. Fisher is a seemingly charming and charismatic professor and he is a good lecturer (despite the sleepy material we covered in class). However, he does speak rather quickly, and I often found that my notes were rushed because I wanted to jot down as much as possible. I would avoid doing this -- you don't need to know much of the historical context for any of the pieces.
Specifically, though, I took issue with the graded essays in this course. While I would consider myself a solid writer, having good grades in my Professional Writing courses, my TA in Eng 10A consistently graded me harshly. For instance, I received a C+ on my first paper, despite going to Office Hours and discussing the content and thesis statement with my TA. What also puzzled me was that there was minimal justification for my grade. When several of the students complained about the needlessly harsh grading and suggested bringing it up at Office Hours, Fisher had the audacity to state that this might result in a lower grade. He said, verbatim, that he might look over our papers and decide our TAs were overly generous in grading. As a result, he reserved the right to lower the grade.
Finally, for the second paper, I decided to seek out my TA with more notice to discuss my paper. She glanced over my paper and told me that this would be an interesting topic and that it seemed well-written. However, she then proceeded to take three to four weeks to actually grade it. Unfortunately, because of how long the grading for this paper took, we ended the quarter without knowing our grades for the paper. After reaching out several times to my TA requesting my grade, I learned that I had received a B-. Again, there was minimal justification for the grade. At this point, I was beyond frustrated.
In sum, I think the reviewers are right. Fisher and his TAs are looking for a specific writing style, and if you're unlucky like me, you'll likely receive crappy grades regardless of how much effort you put in. Unless you're an English major/minor, I would avoid this course.

Professor Fisher is very knowledgeable and passionate in his teaching of medieval literature. However, the in-class essays were hard to manage for me. Especially with the distinct way of close-reading that professo fisher wanted. I feel like he grades too harshly for an essay we have to come up in an hour and 30 min. Especially without knowing the prompt or passages beforehand.