AHIS V3203

Consistent weekly readings, two short papers, one midterm, one final.

I devoted many hours to the readings, going over lecture material for this course and studying for the midterm and final. It was a bit heavier than other courses at Columbia but pretty expected compared to other Art History courses. The grading guidelines were very unclear and so were the objectives for the assignments. The professor's disorganization made every student suffer.

an easy Geography/Dates quiz, one short paper, midterm, final, pretty standard

While at first I thought Professor Reynolds was a mild-mannered individual, he became increasingly irritable and frazzled as time went on. We were consistently behind on lectures, and while he expected the class to be more forgiving towards him, he was not forgiving towards the students. His grading (as is the case with every art history course I have ever attended) was seemingly-basis as there were little comments and no rubric. Though only good comments could be highlighted in a paper, you would still end up receiving a B on it with no explanation or ability to improve.

The course was enjoyable. I learned a lot about the arts of Japan and was very engaged in the material because as an Art History major it is my area of interest. However, I feel like my interest and learning came from within, and not from the course itself. The selected readings and course objectives outlined in the syllabus would have been very effective, however, the professor did not follow them. He always lectured behind the days they were supposed to be given, often changing the material at the last minute right before class, so the readings would no longer apply to the lecture material, and constantly late for his lectures. The subject matter was well chosen, however, the professor would often stray from his material during lectures going into tangents of his own life. To put it concisely, the outline course is well written however in application the course is not taught effectively due to the professor. Professor McKelway was not an effective teacher. He was always late to his lectures and kept the class long over the class time, inconsiderate to students like me who had another course directly after. His grading regulations were not clear and the course was extremely disorganized. He constantly changed his material right before lectures because he was behind in his lectures so it was impossible to be prepared and since he edited his lecture slides before classes and di…

Melissa McCormick is an extremely talented lecturer, who inspires you to want to learn about the topic. Her language is full of imagery and will keep you riveted to the slides for the most part (people may disagree, since many laptop users didn't seem to be paying much attention). She is generally very nice. She tends to wait too long for class participation though, often times she would ask a question and we'd sit in silence as no one answered. Overall, an interesting class if you have any fondness for art.

The bulk of the grades were a midterm and final (maybe like 75%) and then the remainder was a couple papers. We had one that was pass fail, and then a more comprehensive viewing assignment that "required" going to the Met. Naturally, the Met is not the last place you'd want to be, so you should go, but it's not necessary. The midterm and final were IDs (picture on screen, identify artist, approx date (generous), followed by slightly more in depth IDs with descriptions, followed by several short essays about the aforementioned important topics.

Moderate amount of reading that tends to be better written and less b-sy than your average academic (not to mention art history) prose.

This class covers a lot of material (1000's of years) so there's a lot to know, and because it's an art history class, you're gonna be expected to know a lot of things for the tests. However, Reynolds is a decently engaging lecturer and is definitely passionate about the material. The subject is quite interesting with him at the helm, however, I found the readings quite dull. I did poorly on the midterm and relatively well on the final, despite the fact that I only read for the first 2/3 of the semester. This suggests that you need to study the slides and Reynolds' favorite topics more than you need to know every reading. I was able to pick out what he seemed to think was most important (Isozaki, Maekawa, Todaiji, Katsura just to name a few) without much difficulty

I took Professor McKelway's course on the arts of Japan and would say that it was a bit of a mixed bag. First off, he is a really smart guy and knows a ton about Japanese art. Whenever he lectured it seemed like the information just rolled off the top of his head in a way which conveyed that he had a clear grasp of the subject matter. One of the things I appreciated about his style was that instead of making us memorize huge amounts of objects, though memorization was still a big part of the class, he tried to take time with each object and allow people to make comments, effectively running the course like a large Art Humanities class instead of an introductory lecture. This was interesting to me because I had not taken Art Hum at the time and so I was able to really learn a lot about how art is discussed at Columbia and in academia in general. Downside to this though is that we did not make it to the Edo Period in Japanese art. In fact we barely made it through the Momoyama period. This is a huge concern, because we didn't even touch the last 400 years of Japanese art in a course which is supposed to be an overview of art from the country. This disorganization also showed up in courseworks where the readings were not listed in a way which made it easy to tell which reading was for which week and at the end of the semester I carefully went through the readings he posted and co…