Columbia College Core · Columbia University
She is very deserving of a gold nugget! Warm, compassionate, sweet, caring and lovable are words I'd use to describe this professor. I hate writing and I hate literature even more, but this class was such a joy to take that I ended up actually enjoying literature for once in my life! My conversations with her and our class discussions actually helped me improve my writing as well, which is remarkable given how much I detest the art of essay writing and formulating a good thesis statement. The class as a whole is VERY low stress and well very well structured to the point where I actually enjoyed going and talking about what I wrote from my discussion post. She heavily structures the class around student discussion and participation (although she never grades you for your participation in class). She selects a few quotes from the work and will have you discuss one of the quotes with other students in a breakout room, than you share what you discussed as a group. You can use what you discussed in class while writing your papers, so long as you try to add to the discussion in some way, which I loved. In terms of the grade, as other students have said, she's a very lenient grader and you'll most likely come out with an A. She keeps things VERY low stress :) Honestly, just take her class, you won't regret it! She's amazing.
Dalia ist sehr fantastisch. She's delightfully friendly, wondefully enthusiastic and totally warm and genuine. She's also the best way to learn german. I don't think she stops smiling. You never want to miss her class - she always engages everyone and she's never condescending. But she does correct you if you're wrong, which is absolutely necessary. She's not gonna drive you with grammar and put notes on the board everyday. That's what the book is for. Dalia is all about participation - if you participate, you will learn. Plus, she's pretty lenient. Lateness won't kill her, but the homeworks do count in your grade. I'm going to miss her next year.
Take LitHum with Dalia! I agree 100% with everything said in the last two reviews (4/7/21 and 12/25/20), and I struggled to write this without being too repetitive. She's so sweet, cheerful, and accommodating and that translates into students' attitude toward LitHum and contributes to our overall happiness throughout the semester. She is always open to hearing our thoughts and criticisms about the texts (or even the course) even as class is mostly focused on specific passages that we looked at in breakout rooms. Like others have mentioned, her grading is pretty lenient and fair too!
Easy but not light. Typical elementary language workload: 10 - 45 minutes of Hausaufgabe per class. Biweekly tests, sometimes quizzes, biweekly short compositions, final with oral exam, no midterm.
ANGEL. Take her. Take her at all costs. You will love your life as a LitHum student and will one day thank yourself for listening to the advice given by this review. Professor Inbal is incredibly sweet, understanding, and is passionate about the texts, and is delighted when anyone participates in any amount in her class. She grades very generously, just do the work on time and to the best of your ability and 9 times out of 10 you'll get full points. Please I heard that she sets up snack time for in-person classes if this hasn't sold you yet I don't know what will, you sick human...
Ms. Inbal is a perfectly sweet teacher who unfortunately should not be teaching LitHum. The flow of conversation in the class often felt extremely unnatural, as she would call on people in a circle and occasionally interrupt with her own not particularly pertinent insight. She would let the class dwell on very surface level interpretations of the reading, leading to unbelievably boring classes for everyone but the kids who like to hear themselves say the word "normative." She was, however, a kind grader and she even forgave my absences for no apparent reason. The workload was below average for LitHum with unchecked weekly postings and two short and nicely graded essays. Stay in Ms. Inbal's class if you don't care too much about a lacking LitHum experience and want to get an easy A.
Dalia is an angel. It was her first year teaching LitHum, as she is in the Germanic Languages department at Columbia. She has a moderately thick German accent and is rather insecure about her English-speaking abilities, but there we had absolutely no problems understanding her. She likes to make a few jokes and always keeps the mood in the classroom lively. We had a 6-8pm class, which might be one of the worst timeslots you can have for LitHum, but she started a cookie sign-up sheet, and so we had a 10~15 minute break in the middle of each class just to eat cookies and stretch/talk. She's a pretty easy grader; most of our class got A's. She's very lenient with papers (again, most students got A's) and doesn't seem to mind if a paper is 3/4 of a page shorter than it needs to be. That being said, she DOES prepare you well for the LitHum final exam, which is standardized for most LitHum professors. As long as you do all (or most of) your reading and pay attention to the passages she brings up in class for discussion, you will be well prepared for quote identification/passage analysis on the midterm and final exams. Trust me, you want Dalia for LitHum.
Below average for LitHum. Unchecked weekly postings. One 2 page paper. One 5 page paper. Full midterm. Full final. All grades easily.
Roughly 150~200 pages of reading between each class. This is average, if not less than average, compared to the readings assigned by other LitHum professors.