Profesor Calderon was overall a great professor! He is super sweet and his lectures are pretty engaging and very helpful for the course material and understanding, although were sometimes hard to follow (there are no slides, there were some occasional tech problems as is understandable given it was the first quarter online and I found it a little bit harder to understand a second language in particular over Zoom rather than in person). All of the grade is based on two essays and two midterms (half essay, half vocab terms that he gives you in advance you just have to construct your own definitions in Spanish). If you do the readings and, more importantly, take notes during lecture you will be prepared to write the essays (he goes over the prompts for the two essays during class, and gives some hints on what readings the midterm essay prompt choices will cover), although one thing that could have been hard for people during COVID-19/Zoom was that his lectures were not recorded or posted anywhere so if you were unable to make it and didn't know anyone else that would be a problem. Also, his midterms were set for the time slot of regular class so again could be inconvenient if you were on a different time zone. I was initially worried about this class as I am not a very strong speaker but participation in class is not part of your grade, just if you want to. I was shocked at how well I did on the first essay/midterm, so it seems he is pretty understanding of some small grammatical/vocab errors at this level still because I am sure I had some! In terms of textbook, it is a course reader from a place in Westwood not UCLA and he emails the details- I found it to be helpful and it wasn't too expensive, although some of the readings could probably be found online.

This was a great class! As long as you understand the readings you will do perfectly fine. Professor Calderon knows a lot about the material and is engaging and clear when explaining the readings in class. There are two midterms and two essays, and he gives you pretty much exactly what will be on the tests ahead of time. The essays are more broad but as long as you've been to class when he's discussing the readings for the essays, you'll do fine. Professor Calderon also lets class out around 45 minutes to 1 hour early each lecture.

I loved this class with professor Calderon. As long as you do the readings, which are really interesting, you are going to do fine. I would definitely take this class again!