Professor

Matthew Fisher

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Easiness 1.8/ 5
Clarity 3.4/ 5
Workload 2.2/ 5
Helpfulness 3.2/ 5
Most Helpful Review
Fall 2016 - The course consists of two prompt-free essays, a Middle English translation quiz, participation in section, the final, and a "gallery project" (which was new to this quarter). The gallery project was a huge pain in the butt for three reasons: there wasn't a lot of direction so we didn't really know what was expected of us, he kept admonishing us to "have fun with it!", and because we were working on this post-thanksgiving and pre-finals -- while reading Paradise Lost. Tip: get a serious head start on PL during earlier weeks (yeah, I know) so you don't end up reading Milton for 4 hours the night before the final. The final was not nearly as bad as I expected. It was three parts: ID, explication, and long essay. For the ID section, Fisher gave us 10 quotes, we had to write on 6 of them: title, author, original language, date written, and importance of the quote. They were from pretty obvious works and I easily recognized 9 of them. No sweat. The explication essay was straightforward too; we were presented with a poem and performed a close reading. The long essay afforded the most room for creativity. There were two open-ended prompts, we picked one, and answered it using three texts. Fisher required that Paradise Lost be one of those three. Both prompts were interesting, fit well with many of the texts we'd read, and I actually had a lot of fun writing this essay. My advice for this class is to complete the readings *before* lecture. If you do this, you'll be able to more easily sift through his summary and take pointed notes on theme and meaning. While reviewing for the final, I realized that on days when I had followed my own advice, my notes were much more helpful than otherwise. Fisher spends a good portion of lecture giving historical background -- this is all useless. It helps to contextualize the readings and place them along a timeline, but it is unnecessary to know for the final or the essays. Pay a bit of attention to this - especially as it relates to framing the themes of works and common motifs - but don't bother writing taking notes on the English Civil War. This may seem like a small thing, but it ended up really bugging me by the end of the quarter. Fisher consistently lectured for longer than the allotted 50 minutes -- never more than five minutes, but long enough that it made getting to my next class difficult.
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Easiness N/A/ 5
Clarity N/A/ 5
Workload N/A/ 5
Helpfulness N/A/ 5
Easiness N/A/ 5
Clarity N/A/ 5
Workload N/A/ 5
Helpfulness N/A/ 5
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