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Natasha Cabrera HNUH258B Expecting an A Anonymous 12/15/2023	I do feel bad dropping a 2 star review on Dr. Cabrera because she is such a nice and innocent lady. She's really funny and friendly and I love her as a person. But she really has no business being a professor. Like other reviews say, she is unimaginably scatterbrained and I feel like she has no idea what she is saying even as she is saying it. She just talks. I feel like I learned nothing from this class. If she asked a question to the class and someone asked her to repeat it, she would simply not remember what she asked. It could be a second after and she wouldn't know. The class structure was abysmal. Granted, it's the first semester she's ever taught it, but it was horrid. Mind you, we were freshmen and sophomores in University Honors and most likely NOT developmental psyc majors. Every week, we had to read 2-3 peer reviewed research articles in their entirety and post discussion posts just summarizing the readings and the classic "reply to at least one other person". Then we would barely talk about the articles in class. The discussion posts contribute to some overall participation grade, supposedly, but it's unclear exactly what that looks like. We also had to "find a media article related to the topics for the week" each week and bring it to class to discuss each Monday--we probably "discussed our media articles" for like 3 out of the 15 Mondays. Also, big problem, every Wednesday class was entirely devoted to a student group presentation on the research articles for the week. Everyone hated the articles and had trouble comprehending them because they are GRADUATE LEVEL READINGS in developmental psyc and economics, so these group presentations were always the dryest and worst presentations I've ever seen. I do not place that at the fault of the students-- it was a stupid idea to make us read them and try and talk about them in the first place. We had a 5 page reaction paper that was pretty easy mid-semester. Just had to give your opinion and do a little reading. Now. The research paper. The final project for this course is for each student to individually reach out to some community poverty organization and interview a few people who run the organization and write a research paper comparing the interview findings to the things we had "learned" in class. I actually fully support the idea of this project but it was structured kind of poorly and not nearly enough emphasis was placed on it during class time. The rubric for the paper itself was also vague. Her organization of the class was just bad in general. There was one really chaotic class period towards the end of the semester where we were trying to figure out what the rest of the class was going to look like, and she basically had no idea what we were going to do or what she had written in the syllabus. It turned out her syllabus completely neglected the existence of an entire week. The class began going off the rails because she kept giving mixed signals on what we were going to do and a couple students had to pull up the syllabus and tell her what she had written. This is a perfect example of the nightmarish organization that the class faced. TL;DR: Dr. Cabrera is a really kind and friendly lady who will make you laugh but really should not be teaching college students. She is far too disorganized and absentminded to keep the class's structure together. She loves her area of study and clearly knows a lot about it but I did not enjoy her as a teacher. TL;DR (HNUH258B Specific): This class sucks compared to a lot of the other UH classes. I would still say it's worth it to be able to take HNUH258U with Riva, because Riva is perfect, but this class was pretty awful. It's a lot of really advanced academic reading (100 pages per week, usually) and a structural nightmare. However, she grades extremely leniently and I think she does cut us a lot of slack in grading things, but still the expectations are a bit much and the organization is horrid.