US History 1877 to Modern Times – Dr. Tai Johnson
This was the first fully asynchronous class I completed since the trial COVID semester last spring, so it was a very different format from what I was used to in my other classes.
I found myself already getting behind in the first couple of weeks, so I had to create myself a schedule to make sure I was keeping up with virtual lectures and different projects.
We had a weekly lecture, a reading quiz on our lecture due on Wednesday, then a discussion post due on Friday. On weeks we had “exams,” we had no quiz or discussion post, just the assignment due on Friday.
Our exams, which I had put in quotation marks, were comprised of comprehension essays on either the chapter topic or a novel focused on a chapter topic. The exams had pretty specific requirements, as I accidentally wrote a 1600 word essay for an exam that was supposed to be “approximately 1000 words” and had points taken off for going 600 words over the limit.
I found myself frustrated with these kinds of limits as I wrote multiple essays for her class, and I think part of it was the fact I’ve taken a history class every semester and have way too much information to include for each point. The critiques on my first essay included having too many words and too much explanation, so when I shortened my next essay, I got points taken off for being too broad, which upset me because it’s not like I had the room to elaborate without having the same amount of point possibly being taken off anyway.
My artifact for this class includes one of the essays I wrote on a novel we read called They Called Us Enemy. The novel, which was actually a graphic novel, was on the Japanese internment camps from someone who was a child within the internment camp, as well as the struggles he went through based on his heritage during his adolescence and adulthood. This essay was actually never graded, she left it and never gave it a grade before the semester, so I am not sure if it met her requirements. Nonetheless, it was my favorite assignment for the class and I thoroughly enjoyed the novel.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hsUIV7NQLSTCQEVKLoydAKORrQye5nfO4HiBqf15rCI/edit?usp=sharing