FREN 3585

I wish I had liked this class more, but I think it missed the mark for me personally. "History of French Colonialism" is a loaded topic with a very wide scope, so I wish that Professor Tsien had focused on a few specific nations or regions and organized the class into units. The readings were alright, but I skimmed most of them honestly. My main problem with the class is that we had extremely superficial discussions of the impact of colonialism like when middle schoolers find out about colonialism. Our class definitely had the language proficiency to have more mature discussions. With that being said, I think Professor Tsien is a good professor. She brought in guest speakers all the time (doctorate students, law students, study-abroad staff, etc.) and made it clear that she's really good at advising. She set aside time to focus on pronunciation when we had questions too. A personal pet peeve though, she waited until the very end of the semester to release grades on the presentations, so I had no idea what to improve on by the time my second presentation came around (they were 1 month apart). Also, she'll allow you to correct your first paper, but the final paper grade will be the average of the original score and the rewrite score; I didn't know that before doing the corrections. Overall, it was an easy class to refresh my French. I would recommend it if you need a 3000 level French class for some requirement.