HNUH258B | PlanetTerp

Information	Review
Rumeyza Karan HNUH258B Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/13/2024	Pinar (Rumenyza Karan) is a super awesome TA! She is super caring and nice. I'm ngl she carried the class, and grades things well!
Natasha Cabrera HNUH258B Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/13/2024	HNUH258B: The Ecology of Childhood Poverty is taught by Dr. Cabrera alongside Pinar, the TA. I felt that the TA, Pinar did more work than the professor in this course, since she showed up twice a week while the professor only showed up once a week, and Pinar created all of the assignments, graded quizzes, papers, etc.. The course was super disorganized and lacked some structure. The research project was not emphasized enough and the Dr. Cabrera's directions were vague even though she included some in class instructions. The course included a lot of reading, which were long empirical articles each week, sometimes taking about 1 hour to read. We would have "reading quizzes" but these pop quizzes would include a lot of things from lecture. The topic of this course is a bit boring, especially since we were given an in class presentation (by students) on Mondays, and then on Wednesdays, we would have a lecture about childhood poverty. Occasionally, there were some guest speakers brought in, but the topic of childhood poverty is quite depressing after hearing about it twice a week all semester. Overall, Dr. Cabrera is a really nice person, but I felt that this course could have been more organized and well laid out. The grading for the class isn't harsh at all, and I feel that I learned A LOT about childhood poverty this semester.
Natasha Cabrera HNUH258B Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/10/2024	Would not recommend if you want a valuable course, but if you need an easy A, this professor is fine and nice. Especially with the TA. Didn't come to class on Mondays because she was schedule for a different class (kind of suspicious). Cons: - I think the course should go deeper into trends that are not intuitive. For example, "more money into interventions = better outcomes" is a very obvious correlation. But answering questions like "what interventions are ineffective? what interventions are counter-productive? what interventions only have positive impact for a specific demographic?" would be much more valuable. - I think the student presentations could be interesting, but the rubric made students always do a Kahoot at the end. This got old because knowing the specifics of a particular research study wasn't actually valuable. - The instructor got distracted too often, repeated the same things. The quizzes started too late and I would have to stay late (had a class right after) to finish the quiz which is not fair. - The syllabus talks about how every week the content builds on the previous. But I did not feel this at all. I felt more like I was just coming to class for 1 hour and 15 minutes twice a week to listen to someone else speak, and then left. I felt like I didn't have an incentive to participate in class or read the research papers. The research papers we were assigned should be a larger part of the discussion. - Class ended early too often (should be basically never) - Office hours should be more than just 1 hour a week and should specify an end time (I didn't know it was 5:00). Ideally also a Zoom option. Best parts of class and instructor: - Parenting interventions - Our own research literature analysis - Comparing poverty to other countries - Guest speakers
Natasha Cabrera HNUH258B Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/09/2024	Dr. Cabrera and Pinar are two of the sweetest people I've ever met in my life. They are so passionate about human development and childhood poverty, and it really shows in the way they teach. There's one in-class assignment a week and it's so chill -- show up and you'll get the 100%. There are "pop quizzes," but it's so light and we usually don't even have them. You don't need to read the assigned articles, but you can if your heart really desires. Anyways, take this class, it's great. Dr. C also brought us ice-cream because she was sad one day, so like actually take this class.
Natasha Cabrera HNUH258B Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/01/2024	Dr. Cabrera is that girl!!! She's sooo random and she made me laugh. Her class is mad boring though I was fighting for my life every day. No one really participates and it was really awkward at times. The class was also lowkey really disorganized and lectures were mainly the professor going on long tangents. But like I said, the tangents had me ijboling. Other than that, the class was pretty easy. The weekly quizzes were light, and I didn't do most of assigned readings. The main assignments were also graded pretty lightly. Would I take this class again? I wouldn't say that I would. But I think it's one of the better UH cluster classes.
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.

Rumeyza Karan
HNUH258B

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
12/13/2024

Pinar (Rumenyza Karan) is a super awesome TA! She is super caring and nice. I'm ngl she carried the class, and grades things well!

Natasha Cabrera
HNUH258B

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
12/13/2024

HNUH258B: The Ecology of Childhood Poverty is taught by Dr. Cabrera alongside Pinar, the TA. I felt that the TA, Pinar did more work than the professor in this course, since she showed up twice a week while the professor only showed up once a week, and Pinar created all of the assignments, graded quizzes, papers, etc.. The course was super disorganized and lacked some structure. The research project was not emphasized enough and the Dr. Cabrera's directions were vague even though she included some in class instructions. The course included a lot of reading, which were long empirical articles each week, sometimes taking about 1 hour to read. We would have "reading quizzes" but these pop quizzes would include a lot of things from lecture. The topic of this course is a bit boring, especially since we were given an in class presentation (by students) on Mondays, and then on Wednesdays, we would have a lecture about childhood poverty. Occasionally, there were some guest speakers brought in, but the topic of childhood poverty is quite depressing after hearing about it twice a week all semester. Overall, Dr. Cabrera is a really nice person, but I felt that this course could have been more organized and well laid out. The grading for the class isn't harsh at all, and I feel that I learned A LOT about childhood poverty this semester.

Natasha Cabrera
HNUH258B

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
12/10/2024

Would not recommend if you want a valuable course, but if you need an easy A, this professor is fine and nice. Especially with the TA. Didn't come to class on Mondays because she was schedule for a different class (kind of suspicious). Cons: - I think the course should go deeper into trends that are not intuitive. For example, "more money into interventions = better outcomes" is a very obvious correlation. But answering questions like "what interventions are ineffective? what interventions are counter-productive? what interventions only have positive impact for a specific demographic?" would be much more valuable. - I think the student presentations could be interesting, but the rubric made students always do a Kahoot at the end. This got old because knowing the specifics of a particular research study wasn't actually valuable. - The instructor got distracted too often, repeated the same things. The quizzes started too late and I would have to stay late (had a class right after) to finish the quiz which is not fair. - The syllabus talks about how every week the content builds on the previous. But I did not feel this at all. I felt more like I was just coming to class for 1 hour and 15 minutes twice a week to listen to someone else speak, and then left. I felt like I didn't have an incentive to participate in class or read the research papers. The research papers we were assigned should be a larger part of the discussion. - Class ended early too often (should be basically never) - Office hours should be more than just 1 hour a week and should specify an end time (I didn't know it was 5:00). Ideally also a Zoom option. Best parts of class and instructor: - Parenting interventions - Our own research literature analysis - Comparing poverty to other countries - Guest speakers

Natasha Cabrera
HNUH258B

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
12/09/2024

Dr. Cabrera and Pinar are two of the sweetest people I've ever met in my life. They are so passionate about human development and childhood poverty, and it really shows in the way they teach. There's one in-class assignment a week and it's so chill -- show up and you'll get the 100%. There are "pop quizzes," but it's so light and we usually don't even have them. You don't need to read the assigned articles, but you can if your heart really desires. Anyways, take this class, it's great. Dr. C also brought us ice-cream because she was sad one day, so like actually take this class.

Natasha Cabrera
HNUH258B

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
12/01/2024

Dr. Cabrera is that girl!!! She's sooo random and she made me laugh. Her class is mad boring though I was fighting for my life every day. No one really participates and it was really awkward at times. The class was also lowkey really disorganized and lectures were mainly the professor going on long tangents. But like I said, the tangents had me ijboling. Other than that, the class was pretty easy. The weekly quizzes were light, and I didn't do most of assigned readings. The main assignments were also graded pretty lightly. Would I take this class again? I wouldn't say that I would. But I think it's one of the better UH cluster classes.

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.

Reviews for HNUH258B