Nicole Callahan

I know that everyone has said, especially in previous years, that Nicole has been a great teacher who has helped everyone grow and learn from CC. However, her class in Fall 2018 was special in the sense that she said nothing but nonsense in class and never actually taught the texts in the curriculum. She frequently spoke of outside matters that sometimes had nothing to do with the books and then handed out extremely hard midterms or impossible essays where she deducted as she pleased. I've heard of numerous people already trying to switch out of her class now because of her immense workload and intense grading style. DO NOT take her. She is not the grand teacher everyone had spoken about in years prior. Do take another teacher that seems nicer and easier than her.

what everyone else said. midterm's easy. final is stressful AF.

I switched out right after fall sem and that is probably the BEST choice I have made during my entire college experience. All this time, I haven't made a review just because there's too much to write about Nicole (as you can probably tell by the reviews below). The one benefit I HAVE taken from being in her class was, thanks to her INSISTENCE on making the class feel like home, meeting some other students who I still say hi to every now and then a whole year later. Everything everyone below said is true. These are all things I've experienced as part of the class during that semester or things I've heard from classmates I still hung out with afterwards who stayed in the class for the spring. This confirmation is for anyone who doubts the reviews because they've heard "great things" about Nicole (and I've had multiple underclassmen ask me about her and they'd be skeptical when I said she's not so great. Why do people have such a hard time believing it? Idk.). I can pretty easily guess who exactly wrote the reviews based on some of the incidents described and they are so valid. Disclaimer: I was not so f over like many of the other reviewers grade wise, but my life was sure f-ed over by the expectations she put on us in terms of reading, the dreaded participation grading, etc. You can think, "I'll just do well! It's fine!" ... nope. You wanna spend your sophomore year stressing o…

Hard Midterm Two 1 Page Essays 5 Page Midterm Essay 10 Page Final Essay 10 Page Essay for the Final Discussion posts every single class

2 short papers 1 long application paper bi-weekly commentary posts graded on completion Midterm Final - just a long in class essay

Nicole is a great professor. You will definitely learn a lot (she focuses on the applications of the text which is definitely better than just memorizing the content) and class is engaging. Definitely one of the more fun, young, and useful CC professors out there. She also regularly brings food and runs class in a casual manner. However, despite all this I am not 100% sure I would be able to recommend the class. If you are looking for a fun and useful class then this is definitely the best you're going to get. However, her grading style is terrible. She takes a ridiculously long time to grade and often just gives back an arbitrary harsh grade with very little to know justification for why you got that grade. She heavily weights participation but you could easily end up with an 80% for participation for absolutely no reason (despite actively participating) and just messes up your grade completely. She also often makes mistakes and gives wildly incorrect scores where she did the counting wrong and it often is a hassle to get fixed. Sometimes she does not even respond to emails asking about the reasoning behind the grade and at that point it may be after the semester has ended so there is nothing you can do to try to get it change. This kind of organization and lack of a more rigid and sensible grading system makes the class very frustrating and makes me wonder if I would have ju…

A commentary per class Two short papers One longer paper Midterm In class essay as the final

Writing a review here because I forgot to to the course evals! Nicole is a very kind, fun person who's very well-intentioned. That said, I did not think that she was the greatest of CC professors. Her classes are rarely ever discussion based, but rather led like a high school English class in which Nicole goes through important passages in the book and we are expected to nod along. Any questions we ask are answered by her in a clear yes/no way, and there is little room for discussion by the students on the actual ideas presented in the readings. Her workload is pretty light, and the only thing you will have to really do is the bi-weekly commentaries. However, the problem with her assignments is that she is unbelievably late with the feedback--for the spring semester, we got our only long paper back the day before our final, which was a paper of the same format. All in all, she's a sweet person to take CC is, but I'm not sure it's the best class if you want to actually engage with the material and get fair grades that are reflective of your performance and improvement in the class.

Commentaries/Discussion Posts twice a week 2 Short Papers (1-2 pages) 1 or 2 long papers (7-12 pages) Adds 3-4 texts to the syllabus

While Nicole is an engaging and relatable professor, her many downfalls and shortcomings outweigh her praise-worthy qualities. She begins the year by making the content of the works relatable and interesting, but her constant interjections of her personal life, although applicable to the matter at hand, blur the line between professor and friend. She emphasizes that, with the midterm, she does not intend to "trick you," but her grading of the written portion of the exam negates the ease of the passage ID's. Although there is only one real paper per semester, she hands it back the day before the final exam (which is the same format - an in-class application essay) and grades them so much harder than she has made her standards out to be in class. This is on top her inappropriately close (friendly) relationships with some of her students which creates blatant favoritism and an unclear dynamic between herself and the entire class. For the whole year, we were kept guessing how she would grade us and on what scale because, in class, we spent time talking about the history and lives of the philosophers and relating shallow versions of their ideas to whatever was going on in Nicole's life at the moment, but on exams and paper, she would expect the utmost and deepest understanding of the texts. When we had questions about papers and exams, she would either take a week to email back or…