Marilee Scott

OK, so here it is: a long awaited POSITIVE CULPA review for Ms. Scott that should pursuade any future University Writing students to download the first two reviews on this page into his or her circular file (a la trash can). All that I can say is that Ms. Scott is by far the best teacher that I have had at Columbia. The amount of knowledge that woman has stored in her head is ENORMOUS and it is so refreshing to have a teacher who is so passionate about what she is teaching and so willing to share her knowledge with her students AS PEERS. My favorite thing about Marilee is that she made the classroom an engaging place and allowed us to be free to speak our minds. This is not your typical class with an old, boring teacher and tuned out students. She does not stand up there and lecture on what SHE thinks, but usually brings in an outside source to get us thinking and to open a porthole into a particualr text, and then asks us what WE think, before she gives us her opinion. I love that Marilee taught us how to critically engage a text, and to not just assume that because some author wrote it we have to believe it or agree wtih it. Aside from that, she makes writing a process that we were able to become involved in and really helped us to evolve as writers as the semester progressed. For those who wrote the other reviews, and obviously got bad grades, all that I can say is that you…

I don't know what the two reviewers upstairs experienced, but I find Marilee Scott to be the most interesting and enjoyable teacher of all my classes this semester. Her classes are always filled with heated but fun debates, and she not only listens but responds to what you have to say. The class atmosphere is relaxed, and she often brings outside material and starts interesting discussions. Discussions range from talking about an article in the Onion to reviewing classic movies. She really knows her grammar but is never pedantic about it; instead, she makes us feel that it's not a great shame to have a few split infinitives or dangling modifiers in our papers, as long as such mistakes are reduced as we write more. In your papers, she not only points out problems in structure and logic but gives specific advice on how to improve the paper. Her grading is fair and she usually does not give C's after the first 2 papers. And if you put in the efforts, you'll likely get A's on the later papers, especially on the three long ones that count more toward your grade :) She is a very nice person and treats you as her peer, not as her student. She definitely changed my impression of LR from being a living hell to being an enjoyment. I don't know how the reviewers upstairs thought that she's feministic, but I hadn't really heard her expressing any feminist ideas in class, perhaps those two…

Class with Marilee Scott was something... if you're not blindly feministic (to the point of ignoring sense and reason) then in all likelihood you will not enjoy your class with Ms. Scott. Her frenetic presence in class is distracting, if entertaining. Her pedantic tone--distinct from her "canadian" tone--is unnecessary and seems to perfectly mirror her unsubstantive and overly critical comments.

i would suggest two primary methods of preparation for this class: first, drive a nail into each of your ears so that you won't be able to hear anything this ridiculously close-minded femipsychosocialist says; or second, beat yourself so senseless that even if you can hear what she says, the words will be entirely unintelligible- indeed, if you do expose yourself to the excruciating torture that is the tyrannical reign of Marilee- who, no matter how she tries to convince you, is from San Diego and NOT Canada- you will most likely perform one of the aforementioned courses of action in anger that you didn't do it before. Her comments are inane and treat you as if you haven't written a word in your life; if you write "there," she asks "where?" and if you write "It," even if you refer to that "it" so clearly that a first grader could understand, she asks "what?" Her half-assed attempts to relate to her students are transparent, condescending and bothersome, and the disgustingly dry cookies and terrible canadian treats (again, trying to convince us of her being canadian) are almost as difficult to swallow as her pretention and self-righteousness. She even tried to dissuade us from writing reviews of her on CULPA by threatening us that because, as she said with a forced canadian twinge, she would recognize our writing style from correcting our papers throughout the semester, and tha…

Normal. Read a selected text and write an essay each week. Two longer assignments, around midterm and final. BONUS: she lets the class select its own seed text for final paper, does not blindly assign one.

Standard LR workload: one paper per week, 500-600 words. Three long papers (1000 words) at the end.

Standard LnR fare with nit picky grading politics.

her grading is inconsistent and her the criteria for her policies absurd and inane.