Okay... I wrote the last two posts hoping the second one would replace the first one, I did not mean to type sand places!! I wanted to say artists and places, but apparently there was a very unfortunate typo! I apologize if I offend anyone. Strangest typo/auto correct of my life!

Professor Bierman is a nice lady but a HORRIBLE teacher. I was truly interested in Western Islamic art until I took her class. Her voice is extremely soft and monotone, and the material becomes extremely boring because she is extremely boring. Lectures are very unorganized and confusing, the class is unnecessarily difficult. I do not recommend her!

Professor Bierman is a nice lady but a HORRIBLE teacher. I was truly interested in Western Islamic art until I took her class. Her soft monotone voice is enough to put anyone to sleep and the material becomes extremely boring because she is extremely boring. Lectures seem unorganized and difficult to follow because all of the sand places sound alike. The class was unnecessarily difficult! I do not recommend her class.

I just finished with this course and have to say, I was truly disappointed. For one, there is an inordinate amount of reading for an undergraduate level class. I've only taken one Art History class before, and I thought my old professor was much better- he was more concise, more organized, and he tested you on material he covered in class- he gave you the breadth of it and held you accountable for it. Professor Bierman will test you on readings she does not talk about in class, then hold you responsible for minute, specific details from them that she never mentioned or gave allusion to in class. She seems like a very nice woman, rather soft spoken and even funny at times, and she responds to e-mails reliably (or if she doesn't, she will at least address your question in class). She can also be very dry, hard to understand, and a little disorganized. She will be talking about a building and then go off on a tangent, and go back and forth without letting you know specifically which building she's now talking about (and when you are in class making a transcript of the lecture, this is not good). Or she'll forget she changed the slide and keep talking, and she really moves through slides fast. It makes for a lot of confusion, and I wasn't the only one. Be prepared, you will constantly have to ask her for clarification. I was really interested in Islamic Art History before this, but when I found out she would be teaching 104B next quarter I decided not to sign up. She's nice, but she really deflated my interest in taking another Islamic Art class at UCLA. Supposedly she is a great teacher, but is that because she doesn't give homework assignments? I just don't see it. This is not meant to bag on her as a person, again, she seems like a very nice, knowledgeable woman, but she wasn't the kind of professor who made me want to come to class. I came to every one just so I wouldn't miss the slides. I'm not an Art History major, but even the Art History students I talked to in this class had a hard time being excited about this class after it got going and we saw what it was like.