RELI 2085

I learned a lot in this class. Professor Nair is a really intelligent, friendly guy. However, he can sometimes be long-winded in his lectures and tends to get sidetracked, which can make things a little confusing. There's quite a bit of reading assigned, but the overall workload is pretty light. Assignments include a midterm, short research paper, and final exam. The TA for this semester, Essam Fahim, did a good job of covering the most important parts of the readings and getting the class to participate without spoon-feeding us the right answers. Keep in mind that this course doesn't just focus on Islam in the last century or so - it covers the past 500+ years. You'll spend some time going over the basic tenets of the religion, then analyze its evolution up to the present day. In fact, present-day Islam is only briefly covered at the end of the semester because it's impossible to understand it without the context of the preceding centuries.

Nair is a pretty likable guy but his teaching style is disorganized at best. He lectures off of slides containing little to no information (it is usually just pictures that may or may not go with what he is saying) so if you space out for even 10 seconds, when you focus back in, you have no clue what he's talking about or why.
For being a course about modern Islam, Nair also spends about 3/4 of the course lecturing about the history of the Middle East. I understand that he needs to set the stage a little for those who have never studied Islam before, but I feel like this course would be better off if it had a prereq so Nair could just talk about the events of modern day.
You also have a fair bit of writing to do, but it doesn't start until the midterm. Then he runs of out time and crams a few papers in at the end. The worst part about the papers, however, was the complete lack of feedback. We waited about a month to get "personalized feedback" from the graders and when we got the scores back, everyone had a numerical grade (to the decimal; I got an 89.3... how do you get 0.3 points on a paper?) and nothing else. No feedback whatsoever. No way can you take 0.7 points off of a paper and not have some sort of rubric or something to explain why.
Overall, the course was a bit of a let down.