HIEU 2061

This course was not good. Professor Kershaw is very knowledgeable but his lectures are not coherent. He jumps between time periods and speaks very quickly so it is very hard to keep up. He also spends half of the class repeating his previous lectures and showing images of artifacts. His office hours are by appointment by 5 pm the day before, and he did not answer questions during class. This made getting help from him very hard if you did not have time to stay after class. The readings are ridiculously long. I am not sure if this is unique to this semester, but the readings fell out of synch with the lectures. This made the 50-page primary sources very confusing because there was little context. The TA Nadav poorly conducted the discussions. After students spoke there was little response and there was a lack of clarity on the importance of the readings. Your grade consists of 2 papers, a midterm, and a final exam. The exams are 1/2 identifying/giving the significance of obscure quotes from the primary sources. The other half is an essay. This class had so much potential but fell extremely short of my expectations.

I took this class the first semester of my first year. All of the reviews on here are so negative, however, I really thought this class was great. It was very interesting, not too difficult, and honestly didn't require much work. The other reviews on here say that you need to be interested in European history or have some sort of background to take this, I fully disagree. I'm a biology major and have absolutely no background knowledge of history and am frankly not even that interested in it. I thought this class was very easy to understand and interesting. I'm not even a hard working person at all, and I thought the workload was manageable. Professor Kershaw was great, though I'm pretty sure he wore the same shirt every day, his lectures were interesting and easy to pay attention to. I was never bored in the class and able to keep up. The grading breakdown was 20% midterm, 20% final, 30% discussion, 15% essay 1, 15% essay 2. The final was not cumulative and was structured the same as the final. They both consisted of identifying 5 terms discussed in the course for 25 points, and writing a paragraph on 3 excerpts from readings done in the course. There is a lot of reading assigned, but I really never had to read all of it. All you need to do is skim it and try to connect it to the questions given at the start of the reading. For the discussion, as long as you try to talk it isn't bad. The TA was great and led the discussions well. Each of the essays was about 1200 words. You are given five opportunities to write the essays and get to decide which you write. You get two weeks to write the essay, which is definitely sufficient time. You can also write a third essay if you are unhappy with one of your grades on the two and then drop the lowest grade. Overall, this class has way too much hate on here for how it actually was. With doing very little work in the class I was able to get a grade that I'm ok with, you can definitely get an A in here easily if you actually do all the work.