I came into this class excited from my last History class, and I have to say that the TA influenced my lack of enthusiasm for the class. This is supposed to be a decently easy GE class yet the TAs kept trying to curve the essays and tried to make it harder than it really should have been. Most people ended up with a B average. Heck, I was one of them and I felt like I put a lot of effort into my essays adn deserved at least an A-. I took a history class prior to this one and I received an A, so I felt that I knew how to write history papers. The readers were okay and I actually kept up with them. I was disappointedin section because the TA just spent the whole 2 hours summarizing the obvious things from the readings. The essay topics were definitely very difficult to write long papers on. Lecture wise, that was okay and I think I got a worthy amount out of it. Don't expect a lot of help (or quality of help for that matter) from the TAs when writing your paper. If you're going to take this class, make sure its a good TA.

I think Prof Von Glahn is a great professor even though he is monotonic, which is not his fault! He is well organized for every lecture and you can see that he is really trying to make the lecture more interesting. it is sad sometimes to see some students falling asleep in the class and you can tell that he really cares about the learning of his students. One time, he came to my 8 o'clock discussion just to sit in the back and listen to our opinion about the subject. In the last day of lecture, you can so tell that he loves chinese hist because of the way he describe his experience at Beijing. If you really have an interest in chinese hist i would recommend taking him, although some of the reading can be very boring (a few are interesting). I highly recommend Von Glahn!

Professor von Glahn was fine. His lecture were fairly organized, though sometimes I feel like he speaks too fast and I lose some information here and there. The essays and exams weren't terribly hard, and the TA I had, Zhang, was pretty good and knowledgeable, though sometimes he mummbles a bit and was a bit hard to understand. However, some of the reading in the class, especially the Buddhist scriptures, were a bit painful to read.