AN N EA 10W
Jerusalem: Holy City
Description: Lecture, three hours; discussion, one hour. Enforced requisite: English Composition 3. Not open for credit to students with credit for course 12W. Survey of religious, political, and cultural history of Jerusalem over three millennia as symbolic focus of three faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Transformation of sacred space as reflected by literary and archaeological evidence through examination of testimony of artifacts, architecture, and iconography in relation to written word. Study of creation of mythic Jerusalem through event and experience. Satisfies Writing II requirement. Letter grading.
Units: 5.0
Units: 5.0
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2016 - About the class: The class is definitely not as easy as everyone says it is! The GE component (midterm and final exams) is easy but the papers are not easy to write! The prompts are dense and they definitely take a lot of thought and research to do well in. There is a lot of information to cover and they want you to make a lot of connections in the paper. But everything is completely doable! As long as you put in time and effort and ask your TA for feedback, it is all good! The class itself is pretty interesting to me because its not really about religion but about HOW that religion sees Jerusalem as a special place. We are standing in a neutral scholar point of view to examine the religion and their religious views. I kinda struggled with this idea in the beginning but it was fine after the first 2-3 weeks! About the professor: She is clear and very lenient! She gives out study guides but she doesnt post her slides! Some times she would say something but the slide would give other information so it was kinda hectic trying to jot down information from both the slide and from what she was saying.
Spring 2016 - About the class: The class is definitely not as easy as everyone says it is! The GE component (midterm and final exams) is easy but the papers are not easy to write! The prompts are dense and they definitely take a lot of thought and research to do well in. There is a lot of information to cover and they want you to make a lot of connections in the paper. But everything is completely doable! As long as you put in time and effort and ask your TA for feedback, it is all good! The class itself is pretty interesting to me because its not really about religion but about HOW that religion sees Jerusalem as a special place. We are standing in a neutral scholar point of view to examine the religion and their religious views. I kinda struggled with this idea in the beginning but it was fine after the first 2-3 weeks! About the professor: She is clear and very lenient! She gives out study guides but she doesnt post her slides! Some times she would say something but the slide would give other information so it was kinda hectic trying to jot down information from both the slide and from what she was saying.
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2017 - So Professor Ramos just left UCLA but I feel like I still have to rate this class. I actually really liked Prof Ramos. She replied emails swiftly and she was really helpful. She also tried her best to make the content of the class interesting. Key word: tried. This class was boring af. I took it because I wanted to satisfy three requirements at once. But tbh, I don't think I should've. I played myself. The midterm and final were super easy. But I'm pretty good at memorization so that's prolly why I got good grades on them. Sadly, however, the midterm only counts for 10 percent and the final for 15. The papers count for 70 percent. 70. I get that it is a writing class, but come on. And you should know, if you think that you can use your tests to raise your grades, then you should try another class bro. Lastly, there *is* extra credit but it is literally a pretty negligible amount that will be added to your grade. I did two of them. One bumped up my midterm score up one point and the other, my final paper grade by one. The maximum difference extra cred can give is literally less than 1 percent. If you do all three, you may get like 0.6 lol.
Spring 2017 - So Professor Ramos just left UCLA but I feel like I still have to rate this class. I actually really liked Prof Ramos. She replied emails swiftly and she was really helpful. She also tried her best to make the content of the class interesting. Key word: tried. This class was boring af. I took it because I wanted to satisfy three requirements at once. But tbh, I don't think I should've. I played myself. The midterm and final were super easy. But I'm pretty good at memorization so that's prolly why I got good grades on them. Sadly, however, the midterm only counts for 10 percent and the final for 15. The papers count for 70 percent. 70. I get that it is a writing class, but come on. And you should know, if you think that you can use your tests to raise your grades, then you should try another class bro. Lastly, there *is* extra credit but it is literally a pretty negligible amount that will be added to your grade. I did two of them. One bumped up my midterm score up one point and the other, my final paper grade by one. The maximum difference extra cred can give is literally less than 1 percent. If you do all three, you may get like 0.6 lol.
Most Helpful Review
Summer 2020 - Firstly, I will answer whether you should take this class or not: you should take it *if* you have an interest in history and/or religion. Although not compulsory, it will really help if you have taken a Literary Cultural Analysis class before. Secondly, the Professor/TA: I took this class in Summer 2020. Instead of Professor William, his TAs independently take/took this class (don't know how it is in general quarters). My TA was Andrew Danielson and if you have a chance to take Andrew as your TA, take it in a heartbeat. Simply, he is a great, interesting, and helpful teacher who is really passionate about this class and Ancient Near East in general. Thirdly, the class: Andrew's class was extremely manageable, even though it was a 6-week Writing 2 intensive class. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the class structure was changed and is different from the other reviews: 1) -Paper 1 Draft=10% -Paper 1 Revised=20% 2) -Paper 2 Draft=15% -Paper 2 Revised=25% 3) -A short summary of one of the assigned readings+Annotated Bibliography for Paper 2= 15% -Weekly discussion forum post and reply=10% -Watching the weekly writing videos=5% The textbook for this class, 'Karen Armstrong's Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths' will be your Bible for this class and is an inexpensive buy. You will be using it as the basis/starting point of your research for the two papers. Definitely buy it if you want to succeed/learn in this class.
Summer 2020 - Firstly, I will answer whether you should take this class or not: you should take it *if* you have an interest in history and/or religion. Although not compulsory, it will really help if you have taken a Literary Cultural Analysis class before. Secondly, the Professor/TA: I took this class in Summer 2020. Instead of Professor William, his TAs independently take/took this class (don't know how it is in general quarters). My TA was Andrew Danielson and if you have a chance to take Andrew as your TA, take it in a heartbeat. Simply, he is a great, interesting, and helpful teacher who is really passionate about this class and Ancient Near East in general. Thirdly, the class: Andrew's class was extremely manageable, even though it was a 6-week Writing 2 intensive class. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the class structure was changed and is different from the other reviews: 1) -Paper 1 Draft=10% -Paper 1 Revised=20% 2) -Paper 2 Draft=15% -Paper 2 Revised=25% 3) -A short summary of one of the assigned readings+Annotated Bibliography for Paper 2= 15% -Weekly discussion forum post and reply=10% -Watching the weekly writing videos=5% The textbook for this class, 'Karen Armstrong's Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths' will be your Bible for this class and is an inexpensive buy. You will be using it as the basis/starting point of your research for the two papers. Definitely buy it if you want to succeed/learn in this class.
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2018 - The organization of Professor Smoak was kind of difficult to deal with to be honest. He doesn't post the lecture slides online and most of the lecture during class is commentary on the minimal notes put on the slides that he does present, so it was difficult at time trying to figure out what to take notes on and what to ignore. This class is writing-intensive (as it is a Writing II course) including two main papers, weekly reading responses, and an in-class midterm and final. For the weekly reading responses, they're mostly graded on completion and answering the prompt (I got 10/10 on most of them just writing boring responses). The weekly reading itself is another reason I'd dock the class on being disorganized. I didn't really know how the reading pertained to the class. He assigned weekly reading under the schedule but it wasn't mandatory so no one actually did it. As for the in-class tests, the midterm was pretty hard and the final was super easy. His midterm had multiple concepts that weren't listed on the study guide (note: he tests on quotes where you need to know specific words to finish sentences/fill-in-the-blank which were pretty hard, so read the passages he puts on the study guide very carefully). I think he realized that the midterm was harder than he had anticipated, so the final was super easy (I got an 88 on the midterm and a 98 on the final, which was much shorter and a lot easier). For the papers that we had to write, this would probably be my biggest gripe with the class. Professor Smoak and the TA's don't really help that much in writing these papers unless you go out of your way to ask them in office hours to elaborate. During section and lecture, they will tell you what they want to see in the essays, but will hardly give any helpful examples to follow. The prompts for the paper are broad and definitely confused me in the writing process because they had so many facets that I had to narrow down into a single thesis/paper. I eventually went to the TA's office hours to ask for help on this paper and while my writing itself didn't seem that much better/different, I guess it mirrored what HE specifically wanted to see, so I ended up clutching an A.
Fall 2018 - The organization of Professor Smoak was kind of difficult to deal with to be honest. He doesn't post the lecture slides online and most of the lecture during class is commentary on the minimal notes put on the slides that he does present, so it was difficult at time trying to figure out what to take notes on and what to ignore. This class is writing-intensive (as it is a Writing II course) including two main papers, weekly reading responses, and an in-class midterm and final. For the weekly reading responses, they're mostly graded on completion and answering the prompt (I got 10/10 on most of them just writing boring responses). The weekly reading itself is another reason I'd dock the class on being disorganized. I didn't really know how the reading pertained to the class. He assigned weekly reading under the schedule but it wasn't mandatory so no one actually did it. As for the in-class tests, the midterm was pretty hard and the final was super easy. His midterm had multiple concepts that weren't listed on the study guide (note: he tests on quotes where you need to know specific words to finish sentences/fill-in-the-blank which were pretty hard, so read the passages he puts on the study guide very carefully). I think he realized that the midterm was harder than he had anticipated, so the final was super easy (I got an 88 on the midterm and a 98 on the final, which was much shorter and a lot easier). For the papers that we had to write, this would probably be my biggest gripe with the class. Professor Smoak and the TA's don't really help that much in writing these papers unless you go out of your way to ask them in office hours to elaborate. During section and lecture, they will tell you what they want to see in the essays, but will hardly give any helpful examples to follow. The prompts for the paper are broad and definitely confused me in the writing process because they had so many facets that I had to narrow down into a single thesis/paper. I eventually went to the TA's office hours to ask for help on this paper and while my writing itself didn't seem that much better/different, I guess it mirrored what HE specifically wanted to see, so I ended up clutching an A.
Most Helpful Review
Summer 2016 - This class is easy, but not straightforward. At first, I thought I would dislike the class since Wingert has his fair share of dry lectures. It didn't help that if you take it in the summer, lectures are 3 hours each. At the start of the quarter, Wingert asserts that he mostly gives out B's and C's. The grade distributions on Bruinwalk say otherwise, but it doesn't really matter. Just do the work, memorize a timeline of like ~30 dates, and make sure to actually revise your papers. It's a pretty chill class so don't stress as long as you follow the syllabus. However, Wingert does randomly switch up things, like doing a surprise pop quiz or giving you a study guide that is completely different than what the midterm/final will be. As for the book, it helps to read it but its not necessary. It's like 7 dollars anyways if you want to learn some neat stuff about Jerusalem.
Summer 2016 - This class is easy, but not straightforward. At first, I thought I would dislike the class since Wingert has his fair share of dry lectures. It didn't help that if you take it in the summer, lectures are 3 hours each. At the start of the quarter, Wingert asserts that he mostly gives out B's and C's. The grade distributions on Bruinwalk say otherwise, but it doesn't really matter. Just do the work, memorize a timeline of like ~30 dates, and make sure to actually revise your papers. It's a pretty chill class so don't stress as long as you follow the syllabus. However, Wingert does randomly switch up things, like doing a surprise pop quiz or giving you a study guide that is completely different than what the midterm/final will be. As for the book, it helps to read it but its not necessary. It's like 7 dollars anyways if you want to learn some neat stuff about Jerusalem.
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