ASCE UN1367

lots of interesting perspective on ea history. great class.

Some knowledge in Chinese & Vietnamese will help. It will be optimal if you are familiar with Chinese history and foundational texts in East Asia.

This course attempted to cover too much material and in such great detail that it became overwhelming and frankly torturous. There was no engagement from either Professor Phan or from Dan Nguyen in either lecture or recitation because the entire course was a race to cover as much material as possible. I do not see the point of a course like this. There was little time to interact with any of the material or draw our own conclusions as students. Rather, Prof Phan and the TAs just lectured at us and expected us to memorize their in depth, nuanced, historical takes and regurgitate them on the midterm, which was graded ridiculously harshly. The amount of detail expected in the answers on the midterm (and I anticipate on the final as well) was absurd. Prof Phan often made comments about how "this class was going to move fast," which occurred basically every class where he raced to finish the end of his slide show. It was impossible to take notes and Prof Phan refused to post his lecture slides so if you didn't copy down the slides verbatim you were screwed because inevitably there would be a hyper specific question that referenced some obscure fact on one of Professor Phan's 500 slides that he let you read for 5 seconds before going to the next one. All for him to then say "oh well its in your Keith Taylor reading so you should already know it." I chose this class learn from a full…

I took this for global core, and I think it will be harming my GPA (majoring in non-related field)

Please just less material and less reading. No one does the reading anyway. please.

I learned about historiography and methodologies of ancient-medieval history for the first time. I learned how to identify and challenge nationalist narratives in history. I built my skills in argumentative primary source analysis. Obviously, I learned a ton about Vietnamese and Chinese history.

I learned content about the history of the region now known as Vietnam. I also left the class with some major theoretical frameworks for studying history and reading primary texts.

Since many people in this class are not here for their major, the workload is unmanageable in comparison to the other classes that they do take for their major.

I have taken two seminars on 20th Century Vietnamese and Southeast Asian history prior to taking this course. As far as content coverage and pure information, this class taught me exponentially more than those courses. As a senior history major, I would go as far as to say that this course has injected my brain with more historical information than any other course I have ever taken in the History department. This class was hard to be honest, I just found it engaging enough to do somewhat well so far. I will be grateful I took this course for the rest of my life. 1 Columbia University: Arts & Sciences Fall 2024 Course: ASCEUN1367_002_2024_3-INTROEACIV:VIETNAM : ASCEUN1367_002_2024_3 - INTRO EA CIV: VIETNAM Instructor: John Phan