Maher is a great professor in the classroom, he makes the class very engaging and the information easy to digest and memorable. The main issues the class has is how unclear expectations, assignements, and grades are. From what I've seen this is just an unfortunate fault of the entire ASL department. Communicating with professors is difficult outside of class, and it is very difficult to guage how you are doing until you get your end of course grade, and by then you don't have much room to adjust. If you want to take ASL, take this class, it's a lot of fun, but if maintaining a perfect GPA is important to you, this class' lack of transparency makes it near impossible.

Maher is a great professor, but the class could get fairly disorganized. Students generally have no idea how they have done on assignments or where they stand in the class. That being said, the material is fun and class was always interesting.

#tCFF23

This is my third semester of ASL, this class was a lot easier than levels 1 and 2. A bit more work, but not difficult. I loved this class, was never stressed about it besides quizzes, but those are always stressful. Learned a lot of vocab and felt competent in my signing by the end. Gained a lot of fluidity.

If you are looking for a language and instructor to take, I would highly recommend ASL with Eshgi. As an instructor, he does an excellent job teaching ASL. He is Deaf which I felt was helpful for learning at the intermediate level. His signing was easy to understand which made the course easier. His main mode of instruction was lecturing with images on slides or "games" where we had conversations with other students.

Downsides: One of the most frustrating parts of this class is that all of the work is basically condensed to the last few days before each quiz. Due to the way it was organized, it never felt like we had consistent work but instead had to do it all right before the quiz which was frustrating. I did not feel like he did a good job communicating expectations and we rarely got feedback on our work. He uploaded every grade into Canvas the day he posted our grades in SIS. It would have been really helpful to get this earlier. I did get an A in the course, but I wish I had that feedback in order to improve my ASL skills.

Overall, compared to other languages at UVA, ASL is a gem of a department; however, there is still work to be done in the department with communication of expectations/schedules.

Maher was a fun-loving instructor who really made an effort to make the class enjoyable. Most of the class consisted of learning vocab and some presentations in sign language. Overall he's a pretty good instructor, but I feel like the structure of the class was confusing. Usually, you will be doing group/partner activities in order to understand what you're learning, and they can be quite fun!