Daniel Bergan

Dan Bergan is an engaging and outgoing individual who is generally well-liked by most of his students. I mean, he is genuinely a nice guy, and people connect to this. He is also quite competent in that he knows the material (and he is a PhD AND a CPA). Unfortunately, his teaching style is deficient in many areas, and I also have a criticism regarding his general attitude toward students' performance and well-being in his class.

(1) Classes met twice a week, with approx. 80 minutes per class period. He comes to class five to ten minutes late, and dismisses class with twenty or so minutes remaining in the period. (He was even more than 5 minutes late for the final exam!) Go figure on how this impacts both a student's learning opportunity and his/her attitude toward class.

(2) Class attendance was never taken. In fact, Prof. Bergan himself said that he would forgo taking attendance. Right off the bat, this is a clear signal that many students take to mean that class attendance can be ignored, to their final detriment. It was funny how, at the midterm and final exam dates, people miraculously flooded into the classroom.

(3) When Prof. Bergan lectures, he glosses over the material, and he acts as if what he's writing on the board should be patently obvious to everyone in class - or, if not, then quickly understood. His attitude in this respect is almost condescending!!! He also fails to understand that many of his students were NOT connecting with what he is teaching. Indeed, toward the beginning of the semester, he did make the effort to walk the class through the questions/problems at the end of each chapter. However, by the second midterm, he stopped doing this altogether. (He also never assigned homework or a class project.)

(4) Clearly, all of this in part explains that fact that so many students in his class do so poorly on exams. Most people did "okay" on the first midterm, but from what I gathered, the second midterm was a disaster! (In addition, the second midterm was given AFTER the final possible drop-class date, which was not the right thing to do, in my opionion. People were boxed into staying on board versus bailing out and dropping the class.) In addition, his attitude after the second midterm was one of apathy. It wasn't "his" fault that most people in class did so poorly on the second midterm, RIGHT? As for the final exam, he had a policy, clearly written out and stated in the class syllabus that he distributed on the first day in class, that missing the final would mean automatic failure. However, come final exam time, he let the vast majority of his students take the option of taking as a final class grade the average of the two midterms, or take the final in hopes of raising their grade point. Not surprisingly, almost everyone took the "opt-out" option. (Was he too pressed for time, what with the summer season so soon upon us, to take the time to grade everybody's (failing) final exam???)

(5) Finally, he had a strange habit of breaking out of the flow of his lecture and going off on tangents completely unrelated to the class material, such as the Elian Gonzalez custody case and the Blair Witch Project movie.

I don't quite know what to make of Prof. Bergan. On the one hand, I appreciate and admire his knowledge of the subject, and the fact that he is an easy-going guy. I genuinely like him. But his actions in class, combined with his condescedning attitude, make me think that either he has lost his love of teaching or that he has become lazier and lazier as the years have passed. I know that we are all adults and in college, and that a certain level of individual responsibility is expected of each of us, but an instructor needs to - no, MUST - take a more active, or even a pro-active role, in seeing that his students are learning the material.

If you have the fortitude and self-discipline to learn the material on your own (I mean, this class is practically independent study!!!), then Prof. Bergan is an "okay" and likeable professor. You will do well in his class. But he is not a stellar professor, which I believe that he could be, if only he would love what he does and if he would take a more active interest/concern in how his students are doing.

Indeed, I wonder if whether colleges should stop wasting everyone's time asking for teacher performance evaluaitons that are never acted upon.