Professor
Debora Shuger
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Most Helpful Review
I've had Shuger for 10A, Elizabethan Lit (151), and Milton, and I absolutely love her. Yes, she can seem scatterbrained at first if you take her for 10A, yes there is historical emphasis and yes the final is date-based (and only about half an hour long, which I thought was nice). 10A isn't the class I'd start with to form an opinion of her teaching. She is easily one of my favorite professors at UCLA and Elizabethan with her is likely my favorite class to date. She knows so much about everything and she is the nicest, most approachable person. Her lectures are entertaining and so valuable; I learned so much from her. She's so passionate about her subject and makes it really accessible, and she's hilarious. She's pretty lenient, too. Elizabethan as a subject was wonderful with her, but it also wasn't a lot of work. Short one-page papers every week on whatever you feel like talking about and her translate-into-modern-English quizzes (which every class gets). I recommend her wholeheartedly.
I've had Shuger for 10A, Elizabethan Lit (151), and Milton, and I absolutely love her. Yes, she can seem scatterbrained at first if you take her for 10A, yes there is historical emphasis and yes the final is date-based (and only about half an hour long, which I thought was nice). 10A isn't the class I'd start with to form an opinion of her teaching. She is easily one of my favorite professors at UCLA and Elizabethan with her is likely my favorite class to date. She knows so much about everything and she is the nicest, most approachable person. Her lectures are entertaining and so valuable; I learned so much from her. She's so passionate about her subject and makes it really accessible, and she's hilarious. She's pretty lenient, too. Elizabethan as a subject was wonderful with her, but it also wasn't a lot of work. Short one-page papers every week on whatever you feel like talking about and her translate-into-modern-English quizzes (which every class gets). I recommend her wholeheartedly.
Most Helpful Review
Fall 2020 - I took Professor Shuger's class during the COVID-19 pandemic so all the lectures were prerecorded to watch in our free time while the live lectures were just optional office hours where students could pop in Zoom with questions. Her lectures were very interesting and she is obviously passionate about what she teaches. The grading was dependent on the TA with 3 papers total and a weekly quiz. The weekly quiz consisted of 5 questions based on the week's reading with 1 of the questions always being extra credit, so a 4/5 was 100%. This obviously helps out quite a bit! The extra question always ends up being about poem metrics where we would be asked to scan a line from the text. She was understandable that not everyone is amazing at poem metrics so Professor Shuger included an optional Final Exam for those struggling with quizzes. The reading and workload is quite heavy and difficult, but overall the class is doable as long as it's taken seriously. I'm not sure how much the class format will change after the pandemic, but I assume the extra credit on the quizzes and the 3 papers stay the same either way.
Fall 2020 - I took Professor Shuger's class during the COVID-19 pandemic so all the lectures were prerecorded to watch in our free time while the live lectures were just optional office hours where students could pop in Zoom with questions. Her lectures were very interesting and she is obviously passionate about what she teaches. The grading was dependent on the TA with 3 papers total and a weekly quiz. The weekly quiz consisted of 5 questions based on the week's reading with 1 of the questions always being extra credit, so a 4/5 was 100%. This obviously helps out quite a bit! The extra question always ends up being about poem metrics where we would be asked to scan a line from the text. She was understandable that not everyone is amazing at poem metrics so Professor Shuger included an optional Final Exam for those struggling with quizzes. The reading and workload is quite heavy and difficult, but overall the class is doable as long as it's taken seriously. I'm not sure how much the class format will change after the pandemic, but I assume the extra credit on the quizzes and the 3 papers stay the same either way.
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2019 - This is undoubtedly the worst course I have taken at UCLA to date. Beginning the second day of class, Dr. Shuger gave a quiz each week that was largely based on random vocabulary words from the reading that we did. This would be fine except it took hours upon hours to define every single word in the text via the OED, and she would often choose a commonly used word today with a slightly different definition - words that nobody in the class thought to look up because they were consumed by writing pages upon pages of definitions of actually challenging words. Many of her quiz questions were what she admitted to be trick questions, and once she said that there was a question only one student had gotten correct in her 32 years of teaching or whatever. This was pretty detrimental to everyone's grade because the quizzes were only 4 questions long, one mistake turning the grade into a 75. She also mentioned that she has tenure multiple times, meaning she could get away with more things. After submitting our first paper, she told us that she had to drink to even get through grading three of our papers a night because they made her so angry. She suggested that we all turn in a rewrite by June 22 (finals week ended on June 13th) or get an incomplete in the class. She bragged that someone got an incomplete in the class and then returned 14 years later to finish, so this has evidently been occurring for a while. On my essay, she said that I read too closely into the text, but her comments all throughout was that I was "too vague." After weeks stressing over the class, I still could not pinpoint what she wanted from us. There was always an issue with our interpretations, or anyone's thoughts that did not fall in alignment with hers; regularly, she would call other literary critics "wrong" without engaging with what made them "wrong." It felt like she wanted us to fail, and that she was only teaching the course to brag about her in-depth and obscure knowledge (or singing talents?) that had little relevance to Milton. My classmates and I were filled with anxiety and problems understanding her point to the degree where the room was tense most of the time. About three or four of my friends dropped out within the first week, and the number of students that left increased and increased with time. However, she responds to emails quickly (but referenced to a TA that we did not have multiple times?? there was no TA for our class) so I did a lot of messaging her for clarifications. I liked her lectures even though they had nothing to do with our assignments and were more just her theories about two lines of Paradise Lost being about wet dreams or something. She also would bring her dogs to class, and they were super duper cute, but it could be distracting when they were restless or idk humping each other or bleeding on the floor. The whole experience felt odd and disjointed. I can't count the number of times the syllabus was changed, which explains why she never printed it out. It does not explain why she would not update the syllabus online and instead wrote on the board what we would have to do for the upcoming classes. She didn't even use dates when she wrote this stuff down for us, nor did she email the changes to students. When she wrote the altered schedule on the board, she would list it by the days left in the course. For example, when there were 8 days left of class, she would write "Day 1: Book 1-2 of Paradise Lost; Day 2: Books 3-4, Day 3: Book 5, Day 4: Books 7-9..." and so on! Just so weird and disheartening. I have never felt that it is impossible to get a good grade in a class until this one because as hard as we tried, our efforts never seemed to please her. I wanted to like this class so badly, and I have never posted a poor review of a professor before, but this was a remarkably bad experience.
Spring 2019 - This is undoubtedly the worst course I have taken at UCLA to date. Beginning the second day of class, Dr. Shuger gave a quiz each week that was largely based on random vocabulary words from the reading that we did. This would be fine except it took hours upon hours to define every single word in the text via the OED, and she would often choose a commonly used word today with a slightly different definition - words that nobody in the class thought to look up because they were consumed by writing pages upon pages of definitions of actually challenging words. Many of her quiz questions were what she admitted to be trick questions, and once she said that there was a question only one student had gotten correct in her 32 years of teaching or whatever. This was pretty detrimental to everyone's grade because the quizzes were only 4 questions long, one mistake turning the grade into a 75. She also mentioned that she has tenure multiple times, meaning she could get away with more things. After submitting our first paper, she told us that she had to drink to even get through grading three of our papers a night because they made her so angry. She suggested that we all turn in a rewrite by June 22 (finals week ended on June 13th) or get an incomplete in the class. She bragged that someone got an incomplete in the class and then returned 14 years later to finish, so this has evidently been occurring for a while. On my essay, she said that I read too closely into the text, but her comments all throughout was that I was "too vague." After weeks stressing over the class, I still could not pinpoint what she wanted from us. There was always an issue with our interpretations, or anyone's thoughts that did not fall in alignment with hers; regularly, she would call other literary critics "wrong" without engaging with what made them "wrong." It felt like she wanted us to fail, and that she was only teaching the course to brag about her in-depth and obscure knowledge (or singing talents?) that had little relevance to Milton. My classmates and I were filled with anxiety and problems understanding her point to the degree where the room was tense most of the time. About three or four of my friends dropped out within the first week, and the number of students that left increased and increased with time. However, she responds to emails quickly (but referenced to a TA that we did not have multiple times?? there was no TA for our class) so I did a lot of messaging her for clarifications. I liked her lectures even though they had nothing to do with our assignments and were more just her theories about two lines of Paradise Lost being about wet dreams or something. She also would bring her dogs to class, and they were super duper cute, but it could be distracting when they were restless or idk humping each other or bleeding on the floor. The whole experience felt odd and disjointed. I can't count the number of times the syllabus was changed, which explains why she never printed it out. It does not explain why she would not update the syllabus online and instead wrote on the board what we would have to do for the upcoming classes. She didn't even use dates when she wrote this stuff down for us, nor did she email the changes to students. When she wrote the altered schedule on the board, she would list it by the days left in the course. For example, when there were 8 days left of class, she would write "Day 1: Book 1-2 of Paradise Lost; Day 2: Books 3-4, Day 3: Book 5, Day 4: Books 7-9..." and so on! Just so weird and disheartening. I have never felt that it is impossible to get a good grade in a class until this one because as hard as we tried, our efforts never seemed to please her. I wanted to like this class so badly, and I have never posted a poor review of a professor before, but this was a remarkably bad experience.
Most Helpful Review
Winter 2016 - This was the worst class I've taken at UCLA. Which is sad, because I can tell Shuger is a genuinely kind, humorous, intelligent lady who is passionate and knowledgable about the subject and wants us to learn Milton. She is just an awful professor. She is SO well-versed in any literature before 1800 and SO passionate that the class essentially fell apart on the first day into a one person book club that none of the students really wanted to be in. Her lectures go the same way; she begins talking about the topic, but a certain word reminds her of some 14th century German opera or something. She full-on sings 4 minutes of the German opera as the class sits there confused. She then goes into the entire etymology of the word, discussing its Latin roots, and she'll speak nothing but Latin for a few minutes. It then reminds her of a time in her postgrad days when she was really into Chaucer and talks about Chaucer for 10 minutes. She checks the time, realizes we're behind, and moves on to a new topic. After 20 minutes, we've learned everything there is to know about that certain word and every choral piece associated with it, but nothing about the actual poem and what it, you know, might possibly mean. She is just so excited about the topic that she just talks about all these things that have absolutely no relevance to anything. And she's so much smarter than all of us that the things she talks about makes no sense to college kids who are trying to learn about it, not have a PhD level conversation about it. By the end of the lecture, she's gone through and told us 600 allusions that the poem makes to other poems, but you literally have no idea what the poem is even saying. The class itself is just weird as well. The quizzes have nothing to do with how well you know the material. Instead of quizzing you on understanding, she quizzes you on the meaning of very specific words and meanings. Because Milton was written so long ago, there's a good chance you'll come across a word you've never seen before. And she says that it's our job to look up words and phrases in the OED, but if you have time to look up everything you don't understand in the OED in the gigantic amount of reading we're given, I applaud you, because no one in college should have that much time. And in class, she goes over many of these little words and phrases...then makes sure that everything she went over would not be on the quiz. So doing well on the quizzes is just a matter of guessing what some string of words that have no meaning to you means. She also always brings her two puppies into class, which I thought would be awesome, (they're admittedly cute) but the boy dog literally just tries to have sex with the girl dog all class and it's so uncomfortable, and she never notices. So she's in minute three of singing a classic Anglican choral piece because it has the word "virtue" in it, there's a pixelated photo of the moon on screen that she never explains, and there are two puppies having nonconsexual sex on your backpack and you just think to yourself "there are so many other classes I could have taken to fulfill this requirement." If you have an interest in Milton, just buy Paradise Lost from Barnes and Noble and read it on your own. This class will make you nauseous in response to the mention of the word "Milton." I've never been more confused and frustrated by a class. Save urself
Winter 2016 - This was the worst class I've taken at UCLA. Which is sad, because I can tell Shuger is a genuinely kind, humorous, intelligent lady who is passionate and knowledgable about the subject and wants us to learn Milton. She is just an awful professor. She is SO well-versed in any literature before 1800 and SO passionate that the class essentially fell apart on the first day into a one person book club that none of the students really wanted to be in. Her lectures go the same way; she begins talking about the topic, but a certain word reminds her of some 14th century German opera or something. She full-on sings 4 minutes of the German opera as the class sits there confused. She then goes into the entire etymology of the word, discussing its Latin roots, and she'll speak nothing but Latin for a few minutes. It then reminds her of a time in her postgrad days when she was really into Chaucer and talks about Chaucer for 10 minutes. She checks the time, realizes we're behind, and moves on to a new topic. After 20 minutes, we've learned everything there is to know about that certain word and every choral piece associated with it, but nothing about the actual poem and what it, you know, might possibly mean. She is just so excited about the topic that she just talks about all these things that have absolutely no relevance to anything. And she's so much smarter than all of us that the things she talks about makes no sense to college kids who are trying to learn about it, not have a PhD level conversation about it. By the end of the lecture, she's gone through and told us 600 allusions that the poem makes to other poems, but you literally have no idea what the poem is even saying. The class itself is just weird as well. The quizzes have nothing to do with how well you know the material. Instead of quizzing you on understanding, she quizzes you on the meaning of very specific words and meanings. Because Milton was written so long ago, there's a good chance you'll come across a word you've never seen before. And she says that it's our job to look up words and phrases in the OED, but if you have time to look up everything you don't understand in the OED in the gigantic amount of reading we're given, I applaud you, because no one in college should have that much time. And in class, she goes over many of these little words and phrases...then makes sure that everything she went over would not be on the quiz. So doing well on the quizzes is just a matter of guessing what some string of words that have no meaning to you means. She also always brings her two puppies into class, which I thought would be awesome, (they're admittedly cute) but the boy dog literally just tries to have sex with the girl dog all class and it's so uncomfortable, and she never notices. So she's in minute three of singing a classic Anglican choral piece because it has the word "virtue" in it, there's a pixelated photo of the moon on screen that she never explains, and there are two puppies having nonconsexual sex on your backpack and you just think to yourself "there are so many other classes I could have taken to fulfill this requirement." If you have an interest in Milton, just buy Paradise Lost from Barnes and Noble and read it on your own. This class will make you nauseous in response to the mention of the word "Milton." I've never been more confused and frustrated by a class. Save urself
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Most Helpful Review
Winter 2020 - Professor Shuger's class was chaotic and difficult to put it simply. She ensures that it is impossible to get a decent grade with her unreasonable focus on grammar rather than on your understanding of the content of the readings itself. The workload throughout the quarter is made up of weekly short essays where she asks students to pose a question about the reading and attempt to answer it. While this may seem simple, Shuger takes a ridiculous amount of time to line edit each essay based on the grammar she prefers and grades harshly if you misplace a single comma or use what she deems to be the incorrect use of common words like "as" and "similar," often barring them completely from use in the essays. On top of all of this, she grades on a check, check plus, check minus scale, which translates poorly into legitimate letter grades. All of the lectures are scattered and poorly planned – often with problematic anecdotes thrown in every now and then. They do little to none in terms of aiding in student understanding of the complicated readings, leading to essays that she once again deems as subpar. The only positive thing about this class is Shuger's absurd fascination with the power of the internet and that everything has a wikipedia page. But that does not make this class worth your time. Do. Not. Take. This. Class.
Winter 2020 - Professor Shuger's class was chaotic and difficult to put it simply. She ensures that it is impossible to get a decent grade with her unreasonable focus on grammar rather than on your understanding of the content of the readings itself. The workload throughout the quarter is made up of weekly short essays where she asks students to pose a question about the reading and attempt to answer it. While this may seem simple, Shuger takes a ridiculous amount of time to line edit each essay based on the grammar she prefers and grades harshly if you misplace a single comma or use what she deems to be the incorrect use of common words like "as" and "similar," often barring them completely from use in the essays. On top of all of this, she grades on a check, check plus, check minus scale, which translates poorly into legitimate letter grades. All of the lectures are scattered and poorly planned – often with problematic anecdotes thrown in every now and then. They do little to none in terms of aiding in student understanding of the complicated readings, leading to essays that she once again deems as subpar. The only positive thing about this class is Shuger's absurd fascination with the power of the internet and that everything has a wikipedia page. But that does not make this class worth your time. Do. Not. Take. This. Class.
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