Dr. Burke is an extremely thorough professor, perhaps a little to the detriment of actually engaging her students with the material. I enrolled in her class as someone already extremely interested in religious studies, archaeology, the history of the middle east, and with a strong tolerance for dense readings and writing critique. I still had a hard time with some of the readings she handed out, and I found her critique of the papers so heavy-handed it was baffling to me.

I was really, really interested and excited by her lectures but her grading quickly beat that out of me. I spent more time combing every single reading to ensure I didn't accidentally miss a reference somewhere (and therefore get demoted points) than I did actually engaging with any of the course material or synthesizing information. Initially, I read each paper thoroughly and thought about how I could integrate them together, but after being marked down for not including small things, like single-sentence lines in certain papers, I quickly changed strategies to just CTRL+Fing through the readings for shared vocabulary and then forcing myself to talk about whatever words I could find in every single paper.

I don't think her course is HARD, it's just that she cares so much about the small details that it sucks the joy out of learning about the subject matter. Her slides are so thoughtful and she covers the material with what is clearly a lifetime of love and dedication. I came away from the class with a fascination about so many things I had never considered before going into it. Yet, the grading stressed me out so much that I found myself dreading coming into class and losing sleep over the next reading assignments. I understand it's on me as a student for caring so much about my grades, but for those of us here on merit scholarships and planning on pursuing graduate school, such exacting grading is the fastest way to sour the learning experience.

This has to have been the single dullest class I've ever taken. What made it worse is that Professor Burke should be an English teacher. Her focus was far more on your writing than content - and worse, she wanted regurgitation of material, not thoughtful analysis or critique. Though I narrowly squeaked by with an "A" it was the most difficult "A" at UCLA (and I graduated summa cum laude - so I had plenty of A's!) To her credit, Professor Burke was very helpful outside of office hours in providing feedback about why she graded certain ways - though she's a bit prickly if you hint that you're concerned about your GPA and not the material. I went into this class with very high hopes, and left with no desire to ever learn more on this subject again.