Virginia Studies – Dr. Barbara Newton
I truly thought I was going to be intrigued by the topics of this course, but I quickly learned that taking this as a 9:30 Zoom class was not the best idea for my attentiveness.
Dr. Newton was a professor who was truly passionate on the topics she presented, but was nowhere near technologically inclined, which proved to be a slight issue for the class. She lectured off of Zoom on her phone with a binder right in front of her, but still found herself going off on tangents that only slightly related to the topic, but not close enough to be relevant. There was no powerpoint or any kind of visual, just her camera on with everyone else’s cameras off on Zoom. It made for pretty tired mornings until one morning when she let us know we had a group project.
The group projects were all on many different topics from Virginia in history, ranging from topics about Jamestown and its founders from modern Virginia conflicts. My group had Virginia during World War II, which was actually a very interesting topic once I did more research that I thought was almost nonexistent.
Besides the project, there weren’t too many assignments for the class. We had reading quizzes on three different novels every week, then tests on the lectures, novels, and textbook. She let us complete a crossword for review for the tests, which I enjoyed as it combined two things I like: history and a brain game. I enjoy things like sudoku and crossword puzzles to keep my brain working, so it was almost like a casual activity except it was helping me with the test.
My artifact is the powerpoint from my group project I completed. We had to do a minimum 25-slide powerpoint presentation, but 25 “is the minimum, not the A-deserving limit,” so ours is quite lengthy. We had to present to the class and also had to write a paper on the topic as well. The paper couldn’t have been written by all of us though because she believed that would cause the paper to seem choppy, so I did write the paper, but we all put in our equal research into the presentation.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1yQx5t35OU0JLmvseB5L0JeQarS-VFItlwiYAv1mTrOU/edit?usp=sharing