Lorraine Besser

Lorraine is a great teacher; I took one of her first-year seminars and I loved it. She is so accommodating and caring. She offers great feedback on writing, and with her class I became a much better writer, thinker, and philosopher. She is very passionate about what she teaches and if you just put in the effort into class and show you care everything works out great.

Lots of reading and material was always discussed in class. I never felt myself getting lost -- Professor Besser was good about making sure everyone was caught up and understood the content. Overall good course.

I did not enjoy this course. I had never taken a philosophy course before, but I think a lot of folks in the class would agree it was not great. Each class we basically looked at a different philosopher/reading, and never stayed on the same topic for more than a day or two. Thus, I feel like I didn't really learn a whole lot. The professor wasn't the most effective lecturer, but she did summarize most readings. Readings were dense but manageable, I definitely didn't do all of them. She spent a lot of time saying the same thing over and over but with slightly different wording each time, which made things confusing. She'd sometimes say that certain views or interpretations were outright wrong, but never really explained why. Kind of an unexpectedly harsh grader, but she is a very nice person who's willing to help and be flexible. I really didn't like the format of evaluations - although assessments were take home essays, they were far too short to convey and prove what we had learned in class. A midterm should be more than 500 works I feel like.

I did not enjoy this course. I had never taken a philosophy course before, but I think a lot of folks in the class would agree it was not great. Each class we basically looked at a different philosopher/reading, and never stayed on the same topic for more than a day or two. Thus, I feel like I didn't really learn a whole lot. The …Read more