HIME 2002

I found a passion for history after taking this class. Professor Gratien is one of the nicest and most caring professors I’ve had. He really wants to see his students to well. He’s a little awkward but it’s part of his charm. People seem to be complaining about the work load but i really didn’t think it was too much. Around 30% of the grade was just attendance. The media modules really only took 30 minutes a day except for the odd podcast we had to listen to. Not to mention you only had to do 2/3rds of them to get full credit. And the discussion worksheets may have taken a while if there was a book, but I found the books incredibly rewarding and interesting. And he said the text book was supplementary and only to be used for clarification so nobody read it. I personally loved how the professor taught the class. Incorporating culture studies into the coursework allows us to have a more complete view on the region and humanized people some may call savages. I’ve taken a couple other history classes and this had the least work by far. For the rest he gives you the essay prompts before hand and you can bring in a cheat sheet so if you prepare, the tests are easy. I love professor Gratien and I can’t wait for him to come back to UVA. He’s knowledgeable and I’m grateful I took this class.

Please, please for the love of God do not take this class unless you are really passionate about Middle Eastern culture and are taking an exceptionally easy semester. The professor loads this class up to the brim with totally unreasonable amounts of readings. I have taken classes in History, Anthro, Foreign Affairs, Government, and never have I taken a class like this where the professor's assigned readings are simply undoable. And, unfortunately, the readings are not all extremely informative either. You might read an entire 300-page book and learn something that could have simply been explained in class in ten minutes. However, he absolutely will make you do an essay or module on every single one of these readings so you can't skip them either. To give you a sense of the workload: you have to do two media modules per week which could take anywhere from 40 minutes (if you need to read an article and write a response) to 2+ hours (watch a two hour movie or podcast and write a response) each. Then you also need to read 50 pages from the textbook (takes me around 1-1.5 hours), and finally a full 300-page book (around 5 flat hours, sometimes less) and then write about the book for discussion. Some weeks, you might have to read a 145-page book or watch a two-hour movie instead, but then you will have additionally textbook readings. Of course, you will also spend 3.5 hours in class. So that makes a total of 13 hours spent on this class weekly on a bad week. If you were taking 5 classes like this weekly, you would be spending a minimum of 9 hours and 30 minutes a day in class and doing homework, assuming you're not procrastinating even one minute or eating breakfast/lunch. Now, lots of people in this class skim or just don't do the textbook readings, but that's not my cup of tea. I also felt that I could have learned just as much doing less work in this class and several of the assigned readings were FAR more informative than others which were simply a drudge, and the overall amount of busywork assigned just caused me a lot of undue stress. The professor is at least passionate about his subject and loves to talk about niche cultural topics. This class is not taught like a history class that follows a timeline (like X happened then Y happened then Z happened), but rather tends to jump around from topic to topic exploring important events and cultural phenomena in the middle east in depth, even if not always chronologically.

This course was laughably easy and quite dull. I’m sure details will change, but this is how it was when I took it: You submit a question at the beginning of each lecture, which is done for attendance, and you are permitted no more than 3 unexcused absences. There is a midterm, for which he gives the prompts and the terms (along with their definitions) out early, and you are allowed a cheat sheet. This is ridiculous. It is basically a guaranteed good grade regardless of whether you know the information or not. I don't for the life of me know what this sort of test is supposed to accomplish. The way readings are done is strange: there are ten books on the syllabus, of which you are required to read five, and you must write a four page paper on each of those five books. Those papers are not graded very harshly. After the first one he told the class that no one had scored lower than a 17/20. Which is a bit frustrating when you consider the fact that some definitely didn't read the book, and they aren't scoring much worse. I myself tried this tactic and concluded that reading the book was not really a prerequisite for doing well on the paper. These books are fairly interesting, but if you don't want to read them/ don't have time, you'll find you can get away with reading very little. This is problematic for a history course. There is a textbook listed in the syllabus, but all readings from it are optional. Maybe this would be okay if the lectures were crammed full of information. That is not the case. His lectures involved powerpoints with a lot of information on them, and he spends the lectures more or less rewording what was on them. You'll find you are pretty bored of the class midway through the semester, but for the sake of attendance you will have to continue to go. There is a tremendous wealth of information when it comes to Middle Eastern history, but he neither brought it to life nor really covered an adequate amount of it. I wouldn't take a course with him again. I'm sure much of it has to due with him being a new professor, and perhaps the structure of the class will change, but this is not a course I can recommend with a clear conscience.