by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright June 2019
This is my assessment of the history class I'm taking in the Summer 2019 semester: The class is a so-so, a below average so-so.
The biggest reason for so-so is the teacher's theme of being sloppy. In class he is a sloppy speller on the white board. Outside of class he was very slow to get the canvas page set up at the start of class. Other than the sloppiness, I don't like his style of quizzing and grading.
Another part of his teaching style I don't like is how he quizzes during class time. He asks questions of the students, but the questions are formatted for one word answers, not even a sentence, much less a paragraph of discussion.
Finally, he portrays the history as mostly biographies of the principles. He doesn't get at all into the social or technology trends that are happening around these biographies. And some of the biographies seem irrelevant, an example is spending half of a class on John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln's assassin.
So, overall, the class is not offering much insight into what was happening at the time, or why it happened the way it did. It is an insight-poor class. Ah well...
This 18 Jul 19 Economist article, The study of history is in decline in Britain by Bagehot, indicates this is part of a larger trend.
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