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.

I'll be honest, the entire time I was taking this class I took comfort in continually drafting a scathing review of this class. Yet the distance of hindsight has made me much more inclined to be a bit kinder. Professor Fisher is not everyone's cup of tea, yet his self-awareness and callous humor are endearing in a weird sort of way. Everything else you've heard is true, the fact that he talks fast and always reaches for coffee (lately, a phantom cup of coffee because of masks). There is passion behind that rapid-fire speech though which is enough to make me forgive him that. There were many times where he would hit upon a topic of discussion and be so swept up by it that you were too. A symptom of this, however, is that race to synthesize and scribble something down because the way he talks evokes a lot but not in a clear-cut manner. Unfortunately, if he grades your paper he will give you borderline rude and vague feedback and i gotta admit, that was not fun. But he ultimately does believe in you and reassured us he isn't "out to get us" when discussing our final. Which actually turned out to be true. If you read and go to class, you will do fine on the midterm/final. I ultimately am grateful for how this class shaped me, and I still remember/enjoy some of the themes Professor Fisher discussed.

Matthew Fisher is hands down the worst professor I have ever had. He seems incredibly arrogant and does not care at all about how engaged his students are. The guy seems to have a huge ego and really seems to feed off of these freshman/sophomore girls fangirling off of him. Honestly, this class is pretty easy, so it's not hard to pass/get an A, but it's really not worth the amount that you are disregarded as a student. I can't believe a professor this young has ascended to arrogance + apathy this quickly but was very disappointed by his treatment of this class. I get that no one /really/ wants to be teaching 10A, but I still think students deserve respect. This was a real bummer because I was actually really excited about this material.

I hope that Matthew Fisher can continue to grow as a professor, but as he is now, you will not feel like you have gained anything/been treated as a serious student by the end of this class.

I agree that Professor Fisher seems pretentious at first, but over time you realize he uses big words like "ventriloquize" and "polysemy" and "postlapsarian" not because he's trying to rub his Oxford education in your face, but because he just talks like that. He is naturally brilliant, but not aloof or conceited. In some ways, he seems like a young nerd yearning for social approval, especially when he tries to crack jokes and banters with students before and after class about non-academic matters. His tendency to clutch his coffee for the entire lecture without drinking it seems to be a nervous habit and made him even more adorable to me. Also, he's a hopeless romantic: he told us about how he talked to his wife for the entire night when the power went out, and he was always going on about the simultaneously terrifying and amazing moment of saying "I love you" for the first time. Anyways, before I create the impression that I have a crush on Fisher, back to his teaching:

He had a tendency to ask a series of really big, sweeping questions about the texts like: "What is a king? What does it mean to be human? What is a 'true' song? What does it mean to be an angry horse?" I'm not kidding about that last one. I found these sort of annoying, especially because he expected very focused questions for the weekly reading responses. Speaking of these, they feel like a hassle, but if you really spend time on a couple, they can easily develop into your paper topics (both of my papers came out of reading responses).

WARNING: The midterm is easy. The final is not. Do not become complacent after Week 5 if you did well both on paper 1 and the midterm, because the second half of the quarter has WAY more reading. Keep up, or else you'll have to cram three plays, countless sonnets, some dense prose, and the terrifying Paradise Lost into your brain a week before the final— not possible, and I learned this the hard way when I got to the essay and had nothing to say about Milton...

For your papers, go to office hours. I never went to Fisher, because my TA, Megan Smith, was awesome and gave me great direction. I actually enjoyed writing my papers, because Fisher allows you to choose your own topic.

Overall, 10A is a decent introductory English course, but it seems ridiculous that Middle English, Donne, Milton, and other very daunting texts begin the undergrad's English career at UCLA. Fisher was frustrated with us sometimes for our reticence in class, but honestly, I didn't feel comfortable talking about texts that I barely understood the plot of after a cursory homework reading. For my essays, I read my chosen texts at least four times to get to a good level of analysis. I still learned a lot from Fisher and Megan, though, and feel confident going into 10B.

I thought Fisher was great! He came off a bit pretentious and I didn't like him at first, but somehow he won me over throughout the course. He has a way of making ancient themes very relatable. He definitely cares about student learning and wants to be liked by the students, so if you sit in the front he's likely to talk to you. I recommend speaking up in class because he loves questions and often got frustrated by my taciturn class. That said, this class was frustrating because of my horrible TA. If you can, get Megan as a TA. I would have been much happier with the course if I had a different TA or if Fisher himself was doing the grading.

Fisher is one of the most entertaining and engaging professors I've had at UCLA. He has the miraculous ability to take texts that might initially seem too convoluted or bland/straight-forward and extract really interesting, broad themes, which he makes applicable and relatable through occasional anecdotes and brief history lessons. Certainly, he lectures fairly rapidly, and for some texts, he throws out a string of quotes and only fragments of analysis, which you then have to construct into a coherent opinion on the text, but that exactly what an English lecturer should do. His grading is fair — the midterm is passage ID & analysis, with extra credit, and the final only covers the second half of the quarter (but is an hour of quote ID, an hour of poetry explication, and an hour of essay writing on one of the theses he supplies on the final). There are also two take-home essays. The texts are all fairly interesting (or usually are after hearing his thoughts). He is definitely pretentious, which some might find annoying, but I think it just added to the entertainment value of the lectures.

Also, yes, he does carry around his coffee religiously (yet never actually drinks out of it), but so what? Again, it's mildly entertaining, but you don't focus on it because the ideas coming out of his mouth are so intriguing.

I personally did not enjoy this course whatsoever. In fact, I came into this class with the hopes of becoming an English minor, but unfortunately, I had to change the grading to P/NP to conserve my GPA. After all, this is a lower-division course.
Indeed, the majority of these reviews hit the nail on the head. Fisher is a seemingly charming and charismatic professor and he is a good lecturer (despite the sleepy material we covered in class). However, he does speak rather quickly, and I often found that my notes were rushed because I wanted to jot down as much as possible. I would avoid doing this -- you don't need to know much of the historical context for any of the pieces.
Specifically, though, I took issue with the graded essays in this course. While I would consider myself a solid writer, having good grades in my Professional Writing courses, my TA in Eng 10A consistently graded me harshly. For instance, I received a C+ on my first paper, despite going to Office Hours and discussing the content and thesis statement with my TA. What also puzzled me was that there was minimal justification for my grade. When several of the students complained about the needlessly harsh grading and suggested bringing it up at Office Hours, Fisher had the audacity to state that this might result in a lower grade. He said, verbatim, that he might look over our papers and decide our TAs were overly generous in grading. As a result, he reserved the right to lower the grade.
Finally, for the second paper, I decided to seek out my TA with more notice to discuss my paper. She glanced over my paper and told me that this would be an interesting topic and that it seemed well-written. However, she then proceeded to take three to four weeks to actually grade it. Unfortunately, because of how long the grading for this paper took, we ended the quarter without knowing our grades for the paper. After reaching out several times to my TA requesting my grade, I learned that I had received a B-. Again, there was minimal justification for the grade. At this point, I was beyond frustrated.
In sum, I think the reviewers are right. Fisher and his TAs are looking for a specific writing style, and if you're unlucky like me, you'll likely receive crappy grades regardless of how much effort you put in. Unless you're an English major/minor, I would avoid this course.

I wasn't crazy about the readings for this class, but there are very few people who actually like literature from this era. Professor Fisher is one of those few. His lectures are engaging and he's funny, but I agree with the comments calling him pretentious. I personally can't stand when professors are annoyingly condescending all the time so I avoided going to his office hours (although I know others who did had positive experiences with him one-on-one) and just went through my TA. He is definitely a harsh grader, so if you have one of your essays graded by him instead of your TA, good luck preparing for the final. The Middle English quiz was easy, but it counts for so little of your grade that it hardly even matters. The final was the most stressful three hours of my life. I'm glad I passed this class but it definitely tanked my GPA. If you can avoid taking this class with Fisher, do it. But if not, good luck.

The previous Bruinwalk reviews made me nervous to take this class, and for the most part I found them accurate. Fisher is an engaging and often funny lecturer (he no longer holds a coffee cup), and he is approachable in office hours. The final exam and Middle English quiz are also straightforward; they are really not trying to trick you. However, the TAs are much more lenient with grading than Fisher; if he happens to grade your paper, he will most likely give it a C. I'm not sure what you can do to avoid this; I went to my TA's and Fisher's office hours before every assignment to talk about my ideas before I started writing, but I also suspect my TA graded my papers. Discussions were very short (50 mins) and we mostly practiced writing specific parts of an essay (introduction, body paragraph, conclusion) in groups. In terms of specific assignments, the Gallery Project consists of finding and presenting objects related to one text (it's basically making a museum exhibit on Google Slides). The grade distribution was: first paper (4 pages): 20%, Middle English Quiz: 5%, second paper (5-6 pages): 25%, Gallery Assignment: 15%, final: 15%, weekly Reading Responses (short paragraphs): 5%, and discussion participation: 15%. The final had 3 parts: identification, where you were given about 10 quotes and had to identify 3 Old English and 3 Renaissance quotes with the name, author, year published, and significance of the quote; a close reading essay (you are given a passage from one of the texts); and a long essay where you choose between two prompts about broad themes that Fisher has discussed throughout the quarter and use 3 texts to answer it, one of which must be Paradise Lost. KEEP UP WITH THE READINGS! It will benefit you greatly for the identification part of the final, and the long books of Paradise Lost do unfortunately occur in the last week before finals. Overall, this class required the most work simply in terms of the volume of texts we had to read (note: you do not have to absorb much of History of the Holy War or other strictly historical texts; for those Fisher often spent most of lecture going over historical context rather than the actual text). Personally, English literature to 1700 was not my favorite topic as an English major, but in hindsight I'm glad that I read some of the texts, and it helped me understand that people before 1700 were also just people. Seek out help from your TA and Fisher for the papers, and make friends in your discussion.

Right off the bat, I have to say that Fisher is a very harsh grader. My TA gave me As or A-s for all my assignments, including the first essay, "gallery assignment" (which is basically choosing and explaining a series of images), and final, but because Fisher graded my second paper and gave it a C, my final grade in the class became a B+.

That said, he's a very enigmatic and very intelligent professor. His lectures aren't boring even though he does go off on tangents at times, you learn a lot. I cannot stress enough that going to class is essential. Everything in the final exam requires that you understand what Fisher has said about the readings.