Worst class I have taken at UCLA with a bad professor teaching it. It is currently Spring 2018 and I made a bruinwalk account before graduating just to review this class I took two years ago in the hopes that some people see this and decide against enrolling. Dieleman means well, but he is an incredibly boring lecturer teaching only increasingly irrelevant material. In his lectures he shows a very vague and sparse lecture slide and fills in the details, often going on tangents that make the entire presentation hard to follow or take good notes during. This also means you can't skip the class and just read over slides, because the information on them incoherent without some of the things he says in class.

To make matters worse, the class is not easy. You're tested on the names of Egyptian gods and goddesses based on drawings of them, and you need know obscure backstories and myths associated with many of them. It may depend on your TA, but the essay and bluebook tests are not graded easily. The research papers are mind-numbing and require long hours to complete.

The only redeeming quality about this class is Dieleman's genuine interest in Ancient Egyptian religion (even if he cares much less about trying to make students share his interest).

If you still feel like taking this class, download Microsoft OneNote, sit in the front, and record the lecture audio as you take notes so you can go back and try to make sense of what he says. But again, I wholeheartedly discourage you from taking this class; there are much more interesting (and easier) classes to take to fulfill your GE requirement.