Peggy L. Fiedler

I'm not going to be quite as harsh as some of my previous fellow students, but I don't entirely disagree with them either. My biggest problem with her was that in a survey course she spent an inordinate amount of time on covering items of interest to her (the big one that really irritated me was three lecture sessions on the various uses of plants for medicinal and recreational drugs) and not enough time making sure that students understood the very important issues that she was supposed to cover. Holding us accountable on an exam for the functional groups of caffeine or who invented the mass production of chocolate when we were supposed to cover all of ecological theory and the evolution of all life is pretty stupid. Since she was preparing to teach "magic myths and medicine" one couldn't help but feel that she was just plagiarizing herself and using her lecture notes for that class in this one, despite the fact that the classes couldn't be more different.

Dr. Larson made the problem worse, ironically, by remaining an engaging, well-organized and on-point teacher; the contrast between the two was painful. It's also worth noting that Fiedler rarely showed up to Larson's days (though he showed up for most of hers) which means that she would be unable to answer any out-of-class questions about his topics or to connect his content to hers. The point of team teaching is not to scam one's way out of lecture time but to give students different perspectives, after all. Not that I would go to her office hours, by the way, since I found her to be irritating, often intellectually facile and occasionally disorganized enough to be inadvertently just plain wrong. I am not one to be down on profs, but she frustrated me to no end.

On the plus side, I found some of her anecdotes and stories quite interesting and sometimes funny, and some have been handy for party conversation later. (Who knew the nomads of the European arctic drank hallucinogenic reindeer urine?) Still, since I took this class as someone who made a lot of changes in my life to return to school and as someone who takes school seriously, I'd rather get my party conversation material elsewhere.

This class was team taught. Thank god, because I wouldn't have passed! She's actually pretty cool one-on-one, but she needs to take some teaching courses! She's pretty panicked and always squashes in the important stuff in post 2-minutes of class. BRING YOUR TAPE RECORDER if you must have a class with her!! To give her credit, she seems pretty brillant, but she needs to write more and teach less.

Through the rumor mill, Fiedleris only on staff because she'a an expert in her field..wild flowers I think, and the University forces her to teach a class..so this is it. Guess what..she is a horrid teacher and in a few circles she's admitted it. She rambles about nothing for 45 minutes of class time, gets to a point in the last 5 mins, when she panics and realizes that she has wasted all of her time, and then hold you responsible for what she was supposed to have said but didn't. She comes into class looking like she just got out of the shower, completely dishevled. The class is co-taught, and at one point the other teacher, Larson, told us Fiedler wan't going to teach for a few weeks and the class applauded. I'm not joking. Larson laughed. She's god-awful and useless. I can't even call her a teacher.