ENGL W4501

Very accomodating grading. Whatever you do best on [whether it be one of three 2 page papers or the final] is your grade.

2 response papers (4 pages) and graded like mini papers though they don't really "count". 2 Papers (each about 5-7). Final exam with IDs and 3 essays (much more difficult than projected by her). She takes attendance so come to class, but you'll want to anyways because she's pretty engaging.

A book and a movie every week or so; 3 papers.

Great class to take if you are not a strong english student and need to fulfil the Barnard Literature Requirement. Mandatory attendance for 9 AM class but he is very entertaining. Also, you read all those novels that you are suppose to have read -- Mrs. Dalloway, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, The Importance of Being Earnest, etc.

At first I loved this class and by the end of the semester had very mixed feelings about this course. Sarah Cole is an EXCELLENT lecturer and knows her stuff. I enjoyed coming to class and learned a lot from her lectures. That said, she wanted the course to be "seminar-style" and this was very difficult considering that she lectured for most of it and didn't really offer many opportunities for students to speak (and definitely favored a few). I also found that while she meant to be encouraging, if students didn't directly make a comment she agreed with she was a little dismissive and moved on. I enjoyed the syllabus of this course and felt that Professor Cole defended and made each work exciting even though I didn't love all of the Modernist texts. Professor Cole clearly has a passion for what she teaches and makes that very clear when she lectures (such a rarity in many professors), but I also found her to be a little disengaged from her students. She had a TA for a class of 15. While the TA was lovely, it was difficult to navigate whom to talk too about the papers, especially since the TA graded everything. Which is fine, but in a small class, I would prefer to work with the professor. Also, the TA and Sarah Cole grade pretty harshly. I worked VERY HARD in this class and my writing did improve significantly, but I felt that at times I was given grades significantly lower tha…

This is the only review I've ever done on CULPA, and I'm writing it to spare others the aggravation of taking a class with this professor. She is not professor material--certainly not Barnard/Columbia material, and probably not even high school material. Her "lectures" were the worst I've experienced in my 3 years of college, and her ability to foment interesting discussion was virtually non-existent. Furthermore, she took weeks to correct our midterms, and as of June 7th I've heard neither hide nor hare about our second papers (due mid/late April), final exams (early May), or final grades. Previous CULPA reviews warned me about her, but I ignored them; BIG MISTAKE. My intellectual development would have been much better served spending 3 credit hours per week huffing solvents instead of diligently attending her classes. They are a total waste of your money and time. The good news is that, like the large portion of the class that did so, you can safely skip every last one of her lectures and probably still do very well. But if you want to learn anything whatsoever, look elsewhere. My advice: if you see a class she's teaching that looks interesting, buy the books on the reading list (if she bothers to make one up). then don't take the class.

2 papers, 2 reading responses, a final with ids and essays. Fair grading. About 100 pages of reading a class. (Keep in mind that 100 pages is just an average--some classes there were 200, some classes 20.)

It's 9 AM mandatory attendence but... your highest grade on any assignment is your grade for the semester. Take this class! It also fulfills the Barnard Literature Requirement.

This was a lecture course with only around 18 students in it, which was slightly bizarre. Cole lectured as though to a large audience, but provided additional opportunities for class discussion. Unfortunately, the course didn't explicitly engage in its own very explicit project. Rather than actively challenging conceptions of "modernism," the course merely alluded to these conceptions at times. Perhaps, Cole intended students to just be thinking about how the syllabus framed modernism as a fragmented body of work, I'm not sure. Cole does put together a really entertaining syllabus. Ranging from Dora to Burmese Days, the syllabus generates some interesting thematic arcs. I felt like I left the course with a richer understanding of British modernism. Cole's lectures are extremely dense and proceed relatively quickly. She tends to free associate during the lecture, despite coming to class with copious (19 pages!!) of lecture notes. Sometimes, this free association results in profound observations regarding the texts. Sometimes, not so much. Still, the lectures enhanced my understanding of most of the texts. An enjoyable and interesting course.

2 papers and a final. Grueling 9 AM wakeup schedule. Lax/utterly nonsensical grading.