Very interesting! Very engaging and informative, definitely one of my favorite courses ive taken at UF.

Different just about every day, but in a seamless way. Tons of extra credit.

Very engaging and kind guy! He loves the topic and he loves teaching.

Go to every single class and participate.

I took the special study course Humor Writing. It's only one credit & meets once a week. Easy & fun class, especially if you're already an effective writer and have a good sense of humor.

Assignments varied from writing short humorous articles to Twitter threads to listicles. The biggest assignment is the essay. You work on it throughout the semester, Spiker is pretty loose with the topic (you can write about whatever as long as you get the OK from him) and it's only 1000 words max if I recall correctly. No exams or finals, just a few quizzes thru the semester based on some articles you have to read (they're fun reads though since it's all humor writing).

Super engaging & offers lots of opportunities for discussion, help/advice on assignments, etc. He's chair of the journalism department. I wound up taking him for another course & he's my supervisor for my senior project as well. Take him for whatever classes you can whenever you can - he's a great mentor & professor.

Go to class. It's only once a week & it's a fun class, and if you want to do well on the assignments it's crucial to go to class and do the workshopping Spiker has you do. Also he often gives the assignment prompts in class and if you're not there, you won't know what you're supposed to write.

Really fun class, one of my favorites I took in my entire four years at UF. It's so easy to pass as long as you show up, and the lectures are super fun so it's not a drag to go to class. Prof is really funny & engaging - allows a lot of participation from the class but doesn't call you out or put you on the spot or anything. It's even better if you already love sports or are going into sports journalism, but even if you're indifferent to sports it's a fun class. I rated it three stars for usefulness b/c it's extremely useful if you're going into a sports media field, but not if you're taking it as a filler class.

You'll discuss issues in sports spanning ethics, sexism, racism, politics, etc. from a media/journalism perspective. Examples of stuff we talked about - the Tiger Woods cheating scandal, Colin Kaepernick, the Penn State/Jerry Sandusky scandal, etc. Also talked about just generic info for how to cover sports in writing/reporting as they relate to social issues. Several guest speakers throughout the semester too - in person and Zoom.

Super engaging & offered lots of opportunities for extra credit, discussion, etc. He's chair of the journalism department. I wound up taking him for another course & he's my supervisor for my senior project as well. Take him for whatever classes you can whenever you can - he's a great mentor & professor.

Show up to class and you'll do fine. Take some notes. You have to get TopHat (app/website) to do the participation, but it's pretty cheap especially compared to what you'd pay for a textbook. You don't get docked for not showing up, per se - as in, he doesn't take attendance by reading your name off a list - but a portion of your grade comes from answering the TopHat questions which you can only do if you go to class. Also, the exam questions mostly come from material talked about in lecture OR from guest speakers. Some of the Q's come from readings though. You only have like 5 discussion posts the whole semester, I think 3 or 4 quizzes, and a couple exams. None of it's hard especially if you already kind of keep up with sports. LOTS of opportunities for extra credit as well - if you don't...read more