I think he was a really great instructor however he expected too much of us. It is as though he treated it as a graduate level course.

He is not a bad professor, and it is clear that he cares about what he is teaching; however, his class does contain a lot of reading a week. His slides, however, are weirdly structured; they feel like sometimes they are all over the place, and it is hard to establish the connection between what we are supposed to learn and retain and what are just fun facts about Korea that he decided to add to the slide deck. The tests, however, were not bad. They were response questions based on the readings; he gave four possible questions that could be in the midterm the weekend before the midterm and picked 2 for the actual midterm. Although they don't expect you to quote or know everything from the reading, they look for key moments or aspects within your answers. The final is the same: free response and the questions will be given in advance. The 2 papers were not challenging to write, the prompts were straightforward, and my TA was not a harsh grader.

Not recommended at all! Do not be fooled by the nice grade distribution as it definitely did not apply to Fall 2017. The reading was way too much per week and we had to submit a 550 word reflection paper once each week on one of the readings. The readings ranged from 4-5 readings a week with average page length per reading being around 17 pages. I would be fine with doing those readings if they made any sense. There was way too much Korean and Chinese jargon which for a non-heritage kid like me got too overwhelming and I even shed a few tears and wished I was secretly Korean. But, I woke up still non-Korean.

This is why i DO NOT recommend this class even though it fulfills the philosophy GE. It is everything but easy.

He has a very thick accent and does not go over his slides at all in a helpful way (ie going to fast and not really explaining). He does not post the slides online so we are not able to teach ourselves the information. The readings range from 50-300 pages per week and are not very easy to understand as most of them have been translated. When I went to his office hours, he made it seem as though I was supposed to be able to read Mandarin symbols, when this is just a GE. Overall, this course is too difficult for it to be a GE. I should not be having to work harder in this class than in my major classes

Professor himself is nice and SO SWEET, but the TA's do all the work and this year's TA's grade very critically. He used to give midterm topics beforehand but this year did not do so whatsoever. Also, he has an extremely thick accent and is hard to understand. He's like the uncle I've always wanted, but... not the best at teaching.