Reviews for CLAS276

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Gregory Staley CLAS276 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 01/19/2024	I took this course over winter break and this course was significantly more work than winter break courses I have taken in the class. I hate to give him a bad review because he was genuinely nice and I think that most of my issues are related to the time frame of the course(I don't know if he has taught winter break classes before?) He released all of the assignments in mid December because I emailed him and asked him if I should drop the class because I had a commitment in the last week of winter break. He also takes a lot of time to respond to each individual students work daily. However, even though I was able to spread out the assignments over more days than I was given, I spent way more time doing work than I felt was reasonable each day. Most days consisted of 50+ pages of dense reading, 4 20 minute videos and a long harshly graded discussion post. The class had 7 people and we were expected to respond to two peoples discussion posts the same night the discussion posts were due. As a result, I ended up staying up until 11:30 on multiple nights waiting for other people to submit theirs. Grading criteria was not communicated clearly. There were no rubrics, leading to a mismatch of expectations(He was looking for a well developed, thought out response when his rubric looked like he was grading for completion). On tests, he is nitpicky for exact details and wants way more than is possible given his word count/time guidelines. I was not able to get everything in despite using my notes(it was supposed to be closed note) and writing about half of my responses in advance. I literally would have gotten a 50 on these tests if I had taken them honestly. Again I don't think this would have been an issue in a normal semester class because I would have known the information better through having longer to study and do assignments, actual in person lectures and I would have been able to recover from bad grades on the first few assignments.
Eric Adler CLAS276 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 05/22/2023	Professor Adler is one of the best orators I've ever met; that is to say, he is fantastic at talking, storytelling, and keeping your focus. The entire 50 minutes of every lecture I was unwaveringly engaged in the things he was teaching and saying. The class content was very interesting and was structured very well, being very challenging but very leniently graded and as long as you showed an adequate level of thinking on assignments, you passed with flying colors. He's charismatic and funny and has great energy. With that being said, he's rather traditional in his teaching style. He does not use PowerPoints or lecture slides at all, nor does he post lecture notes or summaries, so going to class and paying close attention to the words coming out of his mouth is ESSENTIAL. Exams were fair and focused on big-picture understandings of the topics we discussed. There's a good amount of reading for this class, fair warning. But as long as you hold good attention and don't absolutely blow this class off, it's an easy A, a really interesting class, and great for GenEd credit.