Julie Paulson

I went to this class once and it was really the most agonizing hour I've ever spent in a classroom. As other reviewers have noted, she has absolutely atrocious speaking skills, truely the worst I have ever seen in a professor. If hearing "ummm" every five words drives you insane, DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS. I hate to be so harsh because she really did seem like a nice person, but when you're paying for an education you expect certain things... like at least highschool level speaking skills. She also speaks haltingly, pausing to interject "ummm"s and then rushing the rest of the words out of her mouth as though she's afraid of them. To top it all off, she was very disorganized & had us make 3 changes to the date of our midterm on the syllabus only to finally realize that it had been printed correctly all along.

Dr. Paulson miraculously created a safe space for all opinions, in our Age of Chaucer class, quite a feat considering how vociferous we got at times. She balanced time for our responses to the readings with exposure to her own erudition, which is considerable. Dr. Paulson provided both lectures and small group work, and carefully designed the latter to encourage participation by everyone, not only those with a sense of vocal entitlement, so that the small groups worked as excellent forums for collaborative close readings, drawing out even the shy and the reluctant. Dr. Paulson works very hard to give incredibly detailed and insightful feedback on the midterm and final, which are in the form of short essay answers and one longer essay answer to her provocative prompts. She is generous with her time outside of class and offers excellent advice for auxillary readings. She balanced the syllabus nicely between the traditional readings of The Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and texts such as Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich which have generated fascinating critical attention in the past few years.

Julie is very nice, but has yet to find her teaching "groove." I think the root of the problem is that she lacks self-confidence. To reiterate what has already been said about her, she does play with her hair constantly, and says "um" about 4-5 times on average per sentence. I always felt like she knew a lot more then what she would depart in her lectures. She needed to provide more guidance for our thoughts and discussions. Often, she would ask a question and we would all just sit there dumbfounded, not speaking. The silence could go on for upwards of 30-45 seconds... then, instead of answering her own question or approaching the topic in a different way, she would just move on. It was like she didn't want to step up and "tell" us what something was all about. I can understand what she was trying to accomplish by letting us work stuff out on our own, but many times I felt like she didn't provide enough direction. She relied heavily on groupwork, which often seemed like her way of escaping having to lecture. The whole class seemed to waffle around aimlessly most of the time, not understanding what we were doing. Her grading was tough, but the real problem, in my opinion, was that I never felt like I understood what she was looking for in the essays. All this said, I truly hate to bash her, because she is very sweet and really seems to WANT to be a good teacher. I agree that she would benefit a great deal from a public speaking class, and a healthy dose of self-confidence.

I agree with the prior post entirely. Having read quite a bit of Medieval lit and history I was looking forward to this class; it had a number of flaws however. First, the time of the class -- 4PM to 7PM once a week -- too damn long and late to talk about this stuff. Second -- for every work read we had to write a response paper. Granted, these weren't graded but when you have 4 other lit courses, cranking out 8 to 10 one page papers is a bear. Third -- I have a great deal of respect for Prof. Paulson and empathy for her -- this is obiously her first teaching post and she will undoubtably get better, but she needs to stop fussing with her hair and saying "um" every other word. She might benefit from a public speaking course. Also, she clearly loves this material, but her enthusiasm for it was veiled -- we only saw it every now and again. Fourth and last -- she expects an awful lot from her students, maybe too much. We read _16_ plays and a half a dozen pieces of criticism. Granted, over half of those plays were short, maybe 5 pages tops, but several were doosies (Hamlet? Dr. Faustus?). Top that reading off with the response papers, and two 8-10 page papers, you are dealing with a lot of work. She is a tough grader too -- I think she is nervous to give A's -- I scored A's in all of my other lit courses this semester but she gave me an A-. This after perfect attendance too. So, on a cautionary note, don't take this class if you have a lot of other lit courses. I expect she will lighten up over time but right now she is gung ho.

In many ways Paulson is a very nice person and very knowledgeable about medieval literature, but she is not a good teacher. I had high hopes for this class; Chaucer is one of the best writers in the canon, but I was disappointed by the class.

To start, Paulson rarely lectures. Shell say a few comments at the start of class, but she immediately lets the class discuss the text. This isnt too bad, but when you want to hear about the Chaucers time period or the different views of Chaucer from critics, youre left high and dry. Paulson has articles dealing with the history on reserve but she rarely mentions them during class. What she does do is read from the text and then lets the few gasbags dominate the class. As smart as some of the students are, I want to hear from the professor. And when she does speak, she is surprisingly inarticulate. She plays with her hair and says um ad infinitum. She also tends to have huge pauses between her words. These quirks might even be charming if she imparted great wisdom to us, but she imparts nothing.

Her grading is extremely tough. I feel she has a very narrow view of the texts and anything apart from it gets graded low. Her comments are sparse and vague, and her handwriting is unreadable. She had an exercise in class where she passed examples of fellow classmates opening lines. She then had us critique them. Not surprisingly, the gasbags tore them apart. I didnt have my opening thesis statement in there, but I thought the exercise bordered on cruelty.

The other readings were dull and nowhere near the greatness of Chaucer. The last book The Showings of Julian Norwich was a miserable experience. I know Im not going to love all the books, but there must be better writing than this in the 14th century.

So avoid Paulson if you can. Perhaps in time she will become a better teacher, but for right now, take classes with other teachers.

Dr. Paulson is a very, very nice teacher. She is always available for help - be it during office hours (and she will bend them to accomodate you), for email inquiries, for personal problems or whatever else there might be. She has extensive knowledge of her field (Ye Olde English) and would love to share her enthusiasm with the class. The lectures are usually held 1/2-1/2, which is means part reading, part listening. Lots of discussion time, too. Julie Paulson truly cares, she is involved and interested and I would take her class any time again, even though I don't particularly care for the Canterbury Tales.