This course is a requirement for many students and is just a pain to take. There is a lot of reading and annotating which has to be done on hard copy, requiring many visits to the printer for seemingly no reason. Grades are based on two large papers and participation and you don't even receive a breakdown of your scores at the end of the course to see what impacted your grade. The attendance policies are somewhat ridiculous in the sense that if you miss 2 classes in the entire quarter she will push you to drop the class, even if you are sick. Overall was not a great experience and I would have really expected better from my first class I took at UCLA.

Ight buckle up yall cuz I'm boutta give you the ultimate breakdown to this class. First I would like to say that if you do not want 2 essays to be worth 80% of your grade or if you are not a huge climate change activist, just drop it right now. Also class is mandatory as participation is the other 20% of your grade and if you skip more than 2 classes you have to drop. Our class had a person who got so sick that he couldnt come to class and had a doctors note but was forced to drop because he didnt finish the 1st draft of his essay. (Rip Will) Honorable mention to Anthony though thank you for carrying our class.
First day of class you have to watch a climate change documentary from a list she gives you. Dont take the easy way out like me and choose the shortest one because it will bite you in the ass. Over the first 5 weeks you will write what is quite possibly the stupidest 6 page essay your hands have ever produced. In addition to the essay, you will also be printing and annotating Tamar's textbook which she will remind you hundreds of times that she wrote and write a one pager every day before class. So be ready to print a lot of pages, which to me just doesn't make sense because Tamar is the biggest zero waste activist ever.
Now back to the first essay, you have to write a 6 page essay 1500 words on how your documentary relates to climate change, how you relate to the documentary, and how you relate to helping climate change. See this is where you being a huge climate change activist becomes important because if you're not one (like me) you will have the hardest time completing the third part of the essay. You also have to follow Tamar's AXES which stands for Assertion, example, explanation, and significance. This 4 letter acronym is all Tamar is looking for when reading your essay so you better have that shit clearly evident when you submit it. Tamar also wants to see the word "I" in your essay because she thinks we should have our own opinions on the sources we cite as well as the documentary. This is the other big thing Tamar is looking for and frankly the only thing her textbook talks about, which is ironically called Own Your Perspective and may i remind you she wrote it, just in case you forgot that :). When you start creating your drafts, your peers in the class will read it and give you their feedback until you submit a full draft to Tamar which is when she will have a 20 minute conference call with you talking about what you can do to improve it as well as the grade it would receive right now. (This call happens week 6 so there is no class this week or week 8 because of the second essay.) For the rest of this quarter you can fix up the essay and if you want more tips go to her office hours.
Now onto the second essay. This essay in my opinion was much easier because it is a personal essay where you write about an experience you had in your past or "something that has been taking up your mind recently" but dont be fooled because this essay is everything but normal, it is grammar B. Its not a basic paragraph formatted essay but instead you write your message in the form of labrinyth sentences (which is just one fat sentence that takes up an entire page) or crots (which are one word sentences that your brain thinks in) or repetition or multi genre ideas (emails, letters, diaries stuff like that). This essay has to also be 6 fully developed pages. The peer review and everything is the same as the first essay and week 8 is your conference week so you dont have class then.
Lastly you write a 3 page process memo that is credit no credit and submit all 3 papers week 9. She does not break down your final grade by the way, you just know the letter.
In conclusion, (Tamar hates that phrase btw dont use it and also hates 5 paragraph essays, which is how I wrote this review just to show how much i hated this class :) ) I would not take this class and would rather pick a different professor, not randy tho thats her husband so same shit, or take the class a different quarter.

I really wanted to love this class. Tamar is really nice, funny, and very engaging, but her expectations for this class were really unrealistic. She has an interesting grading scheme, where you have to do different amounts of work, and while the expectations for a C and maybe even a B might correspond with the amount of time and work should be assigned for a 5 unit class, the amount of time required to get an A in this class is completely unrealistic. The premise of this class seems super interesting, but unless you are good with a lower grade, taking it P/NP, or have a ton of free time, I would not recommend taking it. I know that writing 2 classes tend to be quite challenging and time consuming, but with this heavy of a work load this class should at least be 6 or 7 units. I really this class had been structured differently because Tamar really was an incredible professor and I really enjoyed learning from her.

She is a really tough teacher and requires a lot of writing but she gives great insight. If you don't mind putting in the work then she really helps improve your writing! Her classes can be really tedious sometimes as they can get boring. She requires a lot of printing of rough drafts so be aware of that!