HIEU 2121

This is a great class! I was surprised that the overwhelming majority of the content had to do with after the revolution of 1789, but I liked the way that the class was structured, and learned a lot. Dr. Sessions is a great lecturer and also a lovely person. She is so knowledgeable about the topic and always impressed me with the way she answered questions. The grading is very fair with a large portion based on participation, then two journal projects (or midterms, your choice), a final paper, and a group project. I found this class to be interesting and definitely recommend Dr. Sessions as a professor.

Prof Sessions is super sweet and understanding, and this class is really interesting. Participation is 35% of your grade, so just make sure you go to class and do the readings beforehand. She lets you choose between doing a midterm exam, or a weekly writing journal, as well as between a final research paper or a final exam paper (where she just gives you a prompt and you write 7-8 pages about it). She is very available outside of class, and always answers emails really quickly. She is a fair grader, and gives you detailed feedback on how you can improve, which was so nice. She made PowerPoints for each lecture and went though them, but also left time for small group discussions about the readings. Overall, this class is great and made me want to major in History, and it is an easy B+/A- if you do all the work!

This class was very confusing. Professor Sessions is sweet, but she is not a great lecturer. She weights participation too heavily for a history class. You couldn't really participate because there weren't discussion questions, so the only way was to ask questions or make a comment about what she was saying. There isn't homework, just readings. The midterm is either a weekly journal collection or a regular essay-style midterm exam. She graded the journals pretty harshly in my opinion. You must do the readings to understand what was going on and knowledge about the French Revolution beforehand would help. There is a presentation and a paper due in the first month of class and it was pretty rough since we had no knowledge of the material yet. She did not present historical facts very well and her lecture slides provided little to no information about the bigger picture or The French Revolution in its entirety at all. The final is just a paper with an essay question that is available in the syllabus, so essentially you could start working on it at the beginning of the year. I would not recommend this class unless it fills a requirement. It was a small class with boring lectures and daunting midterms.