Check out what the Cyber Hacienda has to say about The Heckler (with parenthetical commentary):
"The course was extremely demanding for a four week course, students were asked to read 3 books cover to cover (this is a misleading comment since two of the books were the size of pamphlets 150 pages and 142 pages and the third book was 297 pages) which they were tested over regularly, in addition to a couple dozen PDF (the student can’t count either-there were not 24 articles to read, there were maybe 12 and some of them were optional reading assignments)., documents ranging from 3 pages to 97 pages. In theory it is good to want all of your students to be able to write a variety of types of styles (yes, in theory it would be nice if this student was not illiterate and could write), but it is not practical if the instructor does not teach someone how to write those styles and is extremely unfair in the grading of those styles. The focus of the course should be on the material, not learning to write different styles, that is why this course and the instructor were failures. I spend more time in this course despite the enormous amount of material focusing on how to write different styles, only to be disappointed after the harsh grading (the average grade for the first major writing assignment was a 90 out of a 100 points). I purpose a question to the history department, what benefit is there to a student who plans on teaching Junior high or high school history to be able to write a book review, NONE (welcome to my word-this student wants to be a high school history teacher-God help us all, or at least those poor kids who have the misfortune of learning history from this illiterate ). They will not even be qualified to rebuff anything published by a Doctor. Would it not be more important that since the vast number of History Majors plan on teaching history at the junior high and high school level that they learn the material, instead of different writing styles? (yes, you should learn the material-that is why you were supposed to read the three books cover to cover and the PDF articles-In the words of that great American fictional character, Napoleon Dynamite, “Idiot!”)"
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1 comment:
I'm a high school history teacher and learning how to write a book review in grad school is a skill I consider among the most important I have ever learned. I use it everyday in the classroom. And we read a book (not a pamphlet) and reviewed it every week of the course. And it was fun.
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