Professor Thomas is amazing. The class is interesting at times, just a LOT of work. A lot of reading, a lot of writing, group project, and a 10 page research paper at the end of the quarter.

I want to believe Professor Thomas is a cool person, but his lectures are very unorganized. Then again, I only really watched about 5/20 of them. After the first week, the class pretty much decided that we had no way of keeping track of exactly what he was really talking about. There were no lecture slides and he liked to skip around with his topics, or worse, spend half an hour going on a tangent. Depending on your TA, you might not even need to watch lecture or do readings(keep in mind this is COVID-19 time). For my TA, our papers were close readings of a work. This really means that I only had to read three works. I'm not a huge medieval fan so I was happy with that.
When I did watch lecture to see if I could gather any contextualization/deeper insight into the work I was close reading, Professor Thomas didn't really provide anything substantial or mind-blowing to help. TAs decide your grade.

The enlarged photo from his Bruinwalk pfp is Arvind petting a cat.
10A with Professor Thomas was actually pretty good. You truly get only what you put into the course. A lot of people really get bored with medieval lit and it becomes a struggle for them to stay awake. Arvind definitely knows that and he actually feels remorseful that he has to teach some of the boring texts in this course. While he's lecturing, he's so professional and rigid, but once the class is over and you talk to him he's just a goo-prone human like the rest of us. He nervously cracks jokes and apologizes profusely for being too boring or taking a little while to screen share. Bottom line is that Professor Thomas is extremely caring and he wants you to actually be excited about the literature vs be intimidated by it. He brings on cool guest lecturers like Mac Harris and Michael Calabrese to modernize/contextualize these texts with pop-culture allusions. The running themes of the class were fairly consistent throughout each lecture, I'm surprised they were not a focal point of the essays. The class solely consisted of 3 essays and participation, it's kind of a cinch — the topics are cool. The only real downside is that Prof doesn't use slides and the engagement during lectures only goes so far. On the first day, there were 170 people on the Zoom and on the last day, there were 30. Stanely Wu is a remarkable TA. I had so much fun in their section, and they are super eager to help students if they are struggling as I was on a couple of the essays. Great sense of humor and a fast grader as well. I would take it again, but I would definitely try to be more present and show up for the live lecture more often than just watching the recordings.