Overall I thought the course was excellent. I was actually considering dropping it after the first lecture, as it wasn’t clear to me what the content was going to be and it seemed at the time that it might be heavily weighted toward political theory (which I am not very well versed in). Needless to say I am very glad that I didn’t, and one of the biggest reasons for this was the prospect of coming out of it with a paper that could be used as a writing sample. I am not sure if I will end up using the final paper I wrote for this purpose but it was a very valuable exercise for me, and a good opportunity to learn more about a topic I am interested in.
I thought both the number of marked assignments and their respective weightings were very fair and set us up well to succeed. I actually quite liked your flexibility with deadlines, although it seems this might not have worked as well for some of my fellow students. Perhaps the incentive to get things done on time would have been stronger if the deadlines for feedback were also deadlines for getting a grade on that assignment.
As far as the structure of the seminar itself goes, I really liked the ratio of class discussion with your lecture material. This being said, I found that on days where we had 2 or 3 presentations we sometimes didn’t get as much lecture time as I would have liked. Consecutive presentations were also a bit draining and it became difficult to stay engaged at times.
I also quite liked that we were exposed to a wide range of topics while also getting to choose one that we could do in-depth research on for our papers.
I found that your teaching style was both informative and engaging, and it really encouraged us to share our opinions and contribute to the discussion. This was a nice change from many of my other classes in which the professor talks at us for most of the class.
So, in sum, I’d like to thank you for the class and I hope that you get more teaching opportunities in the future. You have a knack for it!
Dennis Papadopoulos 