Yaya De Luna

I took the online version of this class. I don't know how much of the format the professor is able to control. I didn't grade this teacher on the book or the material on the syllabus.

Lectures consisted of a brief introduction to the material and set of Internet links. There was no real discussion of these lectures and it was hard to figure out the relative importance of material presented.

I felt the discussion (homework) part of the class was badly conceived. Each discussion session consisted of two days. On the first day, you had to respond to one of two posted questions. On the second day, you responsed to two (or more) of your classmates' postings. Many postings didn't really answer the question, some had completely wrong information. Little, if any, comments were made the professor. So, interactions between relatively uninformed students were the basis of discussions -- instead of interaction between the teacher and the students.

For one session, the teacher had someone else "lead" the discussion. As far as I could tell, this person was never really introduced -- he might have been a student teacher, but I don't know.

The exams included essay questions. When I received back my exam, I was disappointed by the short comment on the exam and I'm not sure that my exam answers were read carefully.

One useful thing provided were study questions for the exams.

I dropped this course late in the quarter. I took it for fun, to learn more about California history in a structured way. Instead, I got to interact with fellow classmates who often knew less than I about California history, weren't careful with their spelling, grammar, relevancy, or historical accuracy.

As the name implies, she's Hispanic and, unfortunantely, has an accent that's strong enough to impede with her teaching skills. I had trouble understanding half of what she said. Furthermore, there was a small group of loud troublemakers in the class. These kids were the type that were probably fresh out of high school and wanted to prove that they were the "big shots" by making pointless statements and generally disrupting the class. The problem with Dr. De Luna in this case was that, instead of quieting them down, she encouraged them to continue. It was so bad that whole class meets were spent with them and her talking about subjects having nothing to do with the class. When she did teach, she spent (in my opinion) too much time on cultural aspects and too little time on what happened in other fields (politics, technological advances, etc), to the point where it felt more like a culture class than a history class. I walked away from that class learning almost nothing and feeling like I had been ripped off. I received the low grade because I was unable to take her class seriously; I'm normally a much better student.