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Shirelle Doughty
JWST372 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 03/29/2026 |
Shirelle is an outstanding professor. Her classes were very engaging, and she made sure to adapt the course to the class' interests. She is very committed to teaching and accessible outside of class as well. I learned a lot and enjoyed every class, and her grading and workload was very reasonable and purposeful. Highly recommend taking a class with her. You'll learn a lot with a little effort and interest. |
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Shirelle Doughty
HEBR498K Expecting an A Anonymous 03/24/2026 |
Wonderful course! Provocative and compelling materials that built organically in a structure that greatly improved my language skills. Emphasis on close reading and literary analysis, but also provided historical and ideological context. The midterm discussion provided a powerful opportunity to zoom out and think about the ways stories, poems and films by/about women might challenge prevailing scholarly and popular narratives about Zionism, Hebrew literature, gender etc. Student presentations also provided an excellent chance to dig deeper and practice our speaking and writing skills. The whole course had a causal tone that made us feel comfortable to really engage, make mistakes and learn. But it also challenged us to think differently and exposed us to a broader range of styles of Modern Hebrew than we usually encounter. Thank you! |
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Shirelle Doughty
ISRL329K Expecting an A Anonymous 03/24/2026 |
I took two courses: Jews & Masculinity and Jews & Race. I’ve taken in-person classes that met twice a week and still required discussion posts, so having just two posts a week felt completely reasonable. Time-wise, it definitely took me less time to get through the material and homework each week than most of my other courses. The readings can be long and sometimes borderline tedious, but it's clear that they're thoughtfully chosen and they connect to the overall themes of the course. The discussion posts are open-ended in a good way. There’s a lot of room to be subjective and explore your own ideas. I wrote about my own experiences/reflections/beliefs pretty frequently and did well on all of them. If people feel like she's not “straightforward” enough in her instructions, I think it’s more that people are looking for a prompt that they can just plug things into AI and get easy answers. You are totally fine if you just write the discussion posts as if you're writing an op-ed. The final paper was also very open-ended and she’s flexible about topics. I proposed several ideas, and she approved all of them. She's happy to provide guidance, but you have to give her a reasonable amount of time--don't wait until the end of the semester. |
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Shirelle Doughty
HEBR498K Expecting an A Anonymous 03/18/2026 |
Took Women's Hebrew Writing at UC Berkeley. Wonderful course! Provocative and compelling materials that built organically in a structure that greatly improved my language skills. Emphasis on close reading and literary analysis, but also provided historical and ideological context. The midterm discussion provided a powerful opportunity to zoom out and think about the ways stories, poems and films by/about women might challenge prevailing scholarly and popular narratives about Zionism, Hebrew literature, gender etc. Student presentations also provided an excellent chance to dig deeper and practice our speaking and writing skills. The whole course had a causal tone that made us feel comfortable to really engage, make mistakes and learn. But it also challenged us to think differently and exposed us to a broader range of styles of Modern Hebrew than we usually encounter. Thank you! |
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Shirelle Doughty
JWST372 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 03/16/2026 |
Shirelle is an outstanding professor. Her course on Zionism was incredibly well executed. Shirelle is organized and communicates well, and also adapts her teaching flexibly to the class' needs and interests. Highly recommend taking a class with her. All around great professor and person. You will get a lot out of her class if you're interested in the material and put some effort in. She was very accessible outside of class and was invested in my learning. I'd say ignore the negative reviews... my classmates also loved her class and her teaching. |
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Shirelle Doughty
ISRL372 Anonymous 12/17/2025 |
Only a few days away from the end of the semester and the majority of the assignments are still ungraded. No communication either. |
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Shirelle Doughty
ISRL372 Anonymous 12/17/2025 |
Professor is fine but do not take this class. She will not communicate it's literally the Wednesday of finals week and she still hasn't uploaded the final. She has not graded any of the like 40+ discussion posts we've done in this class so I honestly have no idea what my grade looks like which is terrible |
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Shirelle Doughty
ISRL372 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 11/30/2025 |
Not a hard class, but very annoying. Is it really too much to ask for straightforward discussion post questions? And can the discussion post questions not be an essay’s length please? |
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Shirelle Doughty
ISRL372 Anonymous 11/23/2025 |
Do NOT take this class if you're looking for an elective that doesn't take too much time Pros: - It's asynchronous Cons: - 2 discussion posts per week with a bunch of questions, asking for specifics and citations. The attached readings have a LOT of pages in them, it's pretty much a whole novel. Sometimes, you have to read not just one, but multiple, so you can compare them. You're also given multiple 2 hour long films you have to watch because there are questions asking about them. - 3 exams including a cumulative final - final essay that's worth 30% of your grade and you have to select a topic that wasn't covered in class because the professor doesnt want you to "recap a lecture" so now you're forced to find a topic with barely any information or sources at all - class is boring, and professor is strict with grading |
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Shirelle Doughty
ISRL372 Anonymous 11/19/2025 |
Taking this class right now and I advise everyone looking for an easy gen ed to stay away. Let's get some of the positives out of the way: it's online and asynchronous. Now on to the negatives: you will get 2 discussion posts every week and you have to respond to 2 classmates per post. On the outside, this doesn't seem bad until you realize that the discussion posts require you to analyze 30+ page PDFs of books with some being extremely hard to read. Most discussion posts will also have multiple questions each with their own sub questions. And if that's not bad enough, you will also have to analyze MULTIPLE 2+ hour long films. The films are blurry and low quality, boring, and are constantly buffering because they're hosted on UMD's crappy streaming service. In this class, you will have 3 exams (one of them being the cumulative final) and a final essay which is about 10 pages long. It's like the professor couldn't decide to have a final exam or final essay, so she decided to do both which is absolutely ridiculous. The worst part? There's an oral section to the exams as if this is some language course. The semester is almost over and we only have like 4 discussion post grades. For reference, we are currently on our 20TH DISCUSSION POST. I am not exaggerating when I say that this has been the WORST experience I've ever had for a gen ed. Please take something else if you're looking for something that you don't have to invest an exorbitant amount of time into. |
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Shirelle Doughty
ISRL372 Expecting an A Anonymous 11/05/2025 |
If you love to have interesting material to read and write paragraphs about during various parts of your week, this course is for you! If you are looking for an easy gen ed, don't like to read or write too much, stay away from this class at all costs! Overall, interesting material, but as far as a gen ed goes; a lot of work and requires a lot of your time. |
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Shirelle Doughty
ISRL372 Anonymous 11/04/2025 |
Pretty good class, all asynchronous and has 2 assignments a week and 3 "exams" and then a final paper. Workload is okay but professor is not the most communicative, she said we would have exams in person but we haven't, also doesn't really say that we are having exams until the week of. Overall pretty manageable |