[HIST 0243]
Mediterranean World 400-1600

Rate This Class

Professor: Burnham, L.

Value of Course / Overall Score

Not Much (50%
Average (30%)
Valuable (20%)

Material

Friendly (30%)
Average (40%)
Competitive (30%)

Class Atmosphere

Boring (60%)
Average (40%)
Fascinating (0%)

Prep Time Needed

1-2hr (20%)
3-5hr (40%)
6-8hr (40%)
9-11hr (0%)
12+ hr (0%)

Grade Weighting

Harder (25%)
Average (0%)
Easier (75%)

Adequate Assistance

Yes (44.4%)
No (55.6%)

Would Recommend Class

Yes (22.2%)
No (77.8%)

Evaluation Comments for Burnham, L.

  1. No Comment
  2. I love Professor Burnham! Her lectures are fascinating and amusing; I always love her classes.
  3. Professor Burnham is a very nice person, but an extremely slow grader - we got one paper and one quiz back all semester. The material tends to be repetitive.
  4. This class would have been fantastic if it weren't for Burnham. Though having her dogs come to class every morning was fun and exciting, it was much more important to me that I learned something - anything. We were supposed to have online quizzes every two weeks and discussion posts every week, however, this never happened. In addition, as much as I wanted to put in my own efforts outside of class, that also proved impossible when Burnham forgot to post weekly reading assignments. I spent hours writing our first paper and received a grade that was much lower than I expected or deserved. The second paper was not assigned until the last week of class even though it was supposed to be weeks earlier. Burnham was distracted and unworthy of my time, in my opinion. I am willing to give my all for any class if I feel that the professor is doing the same, but that was simply not the case.
  5. I agree with previous posters: the lectures and readings are all extremely disconnected. We go from lectures about salt and sheep migration to reading about mountain ranges. Also, the essay topics, even in the beginning of the semester, require outside resources instead of what you've already read, so you have to do a lot of outside research and extra reading, which is annoying. Your topic doesn't even have to connect to anything you may have learned in lecture. It's not the worst possible class to take, and Professor Burnham is at least passionate about what she is teaching, but I really regret signing up for the class. It's not worth getting up at 8 AM for. The only highlight is that she brings her adorable dog to class everyday, but even that is highly distracting, and I feel bad for the girl in my class who seems to have terrible allergies.
  6. I agree with the previous poster: this class is pretty bad. The structure of the class is very strange- learn about two disconnected topics in lecture and read about something totally different during the week to discuss during discussion sessions. I felt like the class had no unity and that she made lesson plans about weird stuff she noticed while traveling in the Mediterranean. Oddly enough we talked about food so often that I thought I was taking a gastronomy course: there were lectures about salt, pepper, the mediterranean diet, and grapes varieties in Sardinia. The essays weren't too bad but Burnham was such a slow grader that I only knew one substantial grade coming into the final. Overall it was a very frustrating experience. In short- avoid this class like the plague!
  7. Professor Burnham herself is a good teacher and historian. Her lectures were very interesting, and even made getting up for an 8 AM worth it. However, I have to agree with the previous posters. While each individual lecture ranged somewhere between mildly boring and quite interesting, the class itself had zero structure. If you asked me what this class was about, I couldn't tell you. The title of the class says it all: "The Mediterranean World 400-1600." That was the subject matter. There was no unifying theme, concept, chronology, or anything that would tie the readings, lectures, and discussion together. We learned some stuff about the Mediterranean, but that was it. At the end of the semester, I was left scratching my head, wondering what the point of it all had been. Beyond that, the readings were brutal (with a few exceptions). The first third of the class was devoted to Fernand Braudel's "The Mediterranean World," which is without a doubt the worst piece of historical writing I have ever read. And I actually enjoy history! Reading that book, and thus the first four weeks, was something akin to torture. It got better after that, but only because after Braudel anything was an improvement. So in short, while I actually quite liked Professor Burnham, don't take this class unless she seriously revamps it. As it stands now, I know a few more random facts about salt, Vikings in the Mediterranean, and art in Spain than I did before, but I still feel like I didn't learn anything. The point of history is to make sense of disparate events and see how they all fit together. We got the disparate events, certainly, but the big picture was totally absent.
  8. Do NOT take this class. It really is terrible. The lectures do not connect to one another, and Burnham just goes off in her own little world and makes bad jokes. One lecture was about salt, which was followed by a lecture on pepper, and finished with a lecture on the vikings. we also talked about salted cod and her dog. I repeat: DO NOT TAKE THE CLASS!!!
  9. I loved this class and thought Burnham was a great professor. She was always very available for extra help or questions during her office hours, she's definitely one of my favorite professors at this school!
  10. I have had other classes with Professor Burnham and enjoyed them, but I was disappointed with HIST243. The lecture/reading combination wasn't coherent, the discussions were often boring and off-topic, and Professor Burnham was generally vague and unavailable. Unless you have a particular passion for Mediterranean history I would choose something else.

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