Student Recommendation

January 20, 2020

 

To Whom It May Concern:

 

My name is Sofia Keen and I am a junior studying marketing and digital and social media business applications at Indiana University Bloomington’s Kelley School of Business.  I was lucky enough to be a part of Sarah’s class, Dystopias in Fiction, during the Fall 2019 semester.  When I signed up for Sarah’s class, I was just looking for a class that fit my schedule and would fulfill my required Arts & Humanities credit.  As a business major, I imagined that taking an English based class would be something I just had to suffer through so that I could graduate on time. However, due to Sarah’s enthusiasm and creative lessons this ended up being my favorite class of the semester.

 

It is evident that Sarah devotes herself to her teaching.  Her lesson plans were always extremely well prepared, creative, and inclusive.  Sarah was always able to generate an interesting class discussion, even on days where you could tell that people were tired and not feeling extremely talkative.  Her ability to lead us in the right direction and set us up to develop our own thoughts and ideas about the themes discussed in class helped make truly learning and understanding the material much easier.  Being able to have such lively class discussion is part of what made the things we talked about in class resonate, which in my opinion made it much easier to actually learn and retain the ideas discussed. 

 

Another reason I found Sarah to be a really impactful teacher was the detailed feedback she gave.  Every single assignment we did in class was returned to us with specific feedback and notes about our work, as well as with very helpful suggestions for how to improve in the future.  On top of that, Sarah took the time to comment on our thoughts with her own opinions on them.  I ended up really looking forward to reading what she had to say about my work because it was obvious that she had put a lot of time and energy into her notes, and actually cared about what I was saying.

 

Additionally, Sarah was very easy to reach for extra help outside of the classroom.  As a student, I tend to dread going to office hours because they tend to be uncomfortable and I often feel like a burden bothering the instructor for help.  Sarah never made me feel this way for asking for extra help.  I attribute going to her office hours to be a huge factor in how I was able to be successful in her class.  She always took the time to thoroughly help me map out my thoughts and get a better idea of what direction I wanted to take my assignments.  Sarah was able to help me come up with ideas of topics to write about that actually interested me, making my overall class experience that much more enjoyable.

 

Overall, Sarah was a phenomenal instructor and her class was one of my favorites I’ve taken throughout my academic career.  I would highly recommend her classes to any of my peers.

 

Sincerely,

 

Sofia Keen