Gold, Claudia. “Response to ‘What is Noam Chomsky like as a professor?” (01 Aug 2013) Quora.

  I took a class with Noam Chomsky my freshman spring semester at MIT (2003). The class was Poverty, Injustice, and Social Change, and the Iraq War had just started. It was a graduate class with about 150 students, and I got special permission to take it as an undergrad. I was a political science major and knew that Professor Chomsky only taught a polisci (not linguistics) class about once every decade, so I had to jump on the opportunity.

  I'm really glad I did. The class was truly incredible.  Chomsky co-taught the class with two other professors, one from MIT and one from Harvard. The class was once per week, for three hours, in the evening. Each week was a different topic related to political change/activism/etc. The other two professors would lecture for an hour or so, and then Chomsky would come in, carrying a large cardboard box. In the box were stacks of newspapers from the week that Chomsky had read. He would put up the news clips on the projector and it was possible to see how he had taken notes on every article with so much detail that there was probably more writing in his notes than in the articles themselves. He would spend about two hours talking about a topic and occasionally taking questions, and then leave again with his cardboard box.

  The class mainly consisted of lecture and large-group discussion. We had a paper at the end of the term that counted for the majority of the grade. Otherwise it was mostly an opportunity to hear Chomsky speak, every week for hours.

  Claudia Gold

  Data Scientist in San Francisco

  Data Science Lead at Good Eggs2014-present

  Studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  Lives in San Francisco, CA

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