<p>Hello everyone,
I'm in the process of looking through the course catalog to choose my courses for the upcoming semester! If any of you can provide insights about the English Department at Smith, it'll be great! </p>
<p>Please also tell me the following:
How hard was the class?
What did you like and dislike about the professor?
Which professors do you recommend and not recommend? </p>
<p>Also, has anyone taken a class with Professor Sapira and Professor Thacher, for COLQ: WRITING ABOUT HUMOR and COLQ: WRITING ABOUT SCIENCE, respectively? If so, please let me know if you liked the class, how you liked the teacher, how challenging the course was, and specifically what kind of tasks you are given in the class. </p>
<p>Some of my favorite English professors at Smith have been: Annie Boutelle (poetry) and Michael Thurston (American Literature, among other classes). </p>
<p>Thurston can be arrogant and he definitely likes to perform in class (we used to refer to his classes as being the studio audience for “The Michael Thurston Show”), but he is really brilliant so people put up with his attitude. He’s also one of those professors that “doesn’t believe in giving A’s”. He told us on the first day of “American Literature before 1865” that in order for an A to be meaningful, it should only be awarded to work that is perfect. And since none of us were ever going to do a perfect paper, since we were imperfect writers, we should just forget about getting A’s and try to do as best we can in the class. I’m proud to say that I did get one A- off of him on one assignment, but I worked really, really hard on that paper. Despite the tough grading policy, I did learn a lot from him, the class was very fast paced and there was a lot of reading, but it was also fun and interesting. </p>
<p>Annie Boutelle is just one of the sweetest ladies ever, and a great poetry professor. She’s a poet herself and works a lot with Smith’s poetry center. She’s just a treasure, I have nothing but good things to say about her poetry class.</p>
<p>I don’t recall the Prof’s name but D loved the Modern British Fiction class. Also tough on grading, however. But it’s a class that has in one way or another come up in conversation for years.</p>
<p>Every English professor I’ve met there is amazing, though I should preface this by saying I’ve not taken an English class, per se, but rather classes in other departments that employ the discipline of English and thereby the English department members.</p>
<p>I second S&P’s recommendation of Michael Thurston; he’s very intelligent, approachable, and extremely funny. I found his American Studies to be insightful and useful when it came to expanding my knowledge of the topic. He also was very good at asking challenging, interesting questions and keeping a conversation going amongst the students.</p>
<p>I also recommend Floyd Cheung and Bill Oram. They are both great scholars in their respective fields of English literature; no one at Smith can match or best Oram when it comes to Shakespeare. Floyd Cheung also teaches in the American Studies department and is perhaps less proficient of a lecturer than Thurston, but no less interesting. They both share Thurston’s ability to ask good questions and manage the flow of a class well, neither allowing students to run them over nor commandeering the course. </p>
<p>I didn’t write papers for Thurston or Cheung due to the way the American Studies course was set up, but I did write some for Oram in my first-year seminar. His comments on said papers were thorough, detailed, and helpful; if you earned less than an A or A-minus, Oram made sure to kindly but fully explain why you did not earn the highest grade. He also offered ample opportunities to re-write and improve one’s papers, though I doubt he would do that in his own English courses. He has high expectations but provides the resources to help you live up to said expectations. I could not say enough good things about him.</p>
<p>I was wondering if anyone took a class with Susan Van Dyne, since I’m thinking of taking the first year seminar Turning Points with her. Is she a hard grader? Are first year seminars similar to the english classes we take in high school?</p>
<p>I would say that it depends on your high school (I’ve never been to high school in Japan!), but generally no, your FYS class will be different from high school English. You’ll probably find that there is less daily work than in your high school classes, and instead focusing more on a few papers spaced out over the course of the semester. You will also probably find that more will be required of you on those papers than was the case in high school. They may be longer than you’re used to, and they’ll require a high level of critical thinking and analysis, and sometimes you’ll be asked to pull in additional resources to make your point (your professor may ask you to choose some literary critics and use their analysis of the work to corroborate your own argument, for example). You may have done multiple source papers in high school, but in college you will probably find it a step up from what you’re used to. </p>
<p>The nice thing is that FYS’ are intended to help ease you into the college experience, so the professor will help you a lot and usually they’ll be a little bit more forgiving. Plus, all of your classmates will also be first years, so you can all be confused and overwhelmed together :-)</p>
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