<p>I liked history in high school and was good at it so i took a european history class currently and it’s pretty hard to keep up. we have to read primary sources on our own which are sometimes tough to get through (if you’ve read them you know what i mean) and we only basically discuss them for 40 minutes (at our weekly discussion) and that’s it. the lectures are not related to the primary sources at all, only cover the same time period. then the essays we write are basically source-based.</p>
<p>i was wondering if this is the same at every college or just my class</p>
Exactly. Many college courses require one to be heavily self-motivated. I’ve had to read through tons of primary sources much like the ones you are talking about and while they can be a pain, they are not that bad.</p>
<p>The lectures are not supposed to be specifically about what you read, since you’ve already read primary sources and should know what happened. They are generally supposed to allow you to think about the texts in context of the times in which they were written.</p>
<p>I think I overreacted with terrible. I know that primary sources are a big part of any history class (I read them in AP US History in high school), but those were just a short excerpt for an essay. I guess I just wasn’t expecting to have to read pages and pages of philosophical stuff or books/plays and (IMO) not doing enough real discussion of them to get a complete idea they were conveying, and to not really have it tie in to the lectures much</p>
<p>It kind of depends on the school. I’ve taken history classes where I had 500+ pages of reading to do per week, plus lecture, and that was all-- but at a lot of classes in my school you also have an hour or two per week mandatory discussion. I really don’t think the discussion contributes that much to the history courses, it’s really all about the reading and writing. But that’s just me and my particular school, and I’ve only taken four or five upper level history classes here.</p>
<p>As for your more recent post, you tie those readings into your papers and exams. You are looking for spoon feeding, which is not something you get anymore. Just because you are not explicitly asked to do something in a discussion section does not mean that you are not expected to do it yourself and implement it into your work. You’re just supposed to do that kind of thing on your own, and talk to the professor if you need help.</p>
<p>If the lectures are about the time period the primary sources are written in, then they are totally related the primary sources. You have to tie the lecture material and historical context into the primary sources.</p>
<p>It depends on the class - lower-level classes generally aren’t like that. I’m a history major…in one of my 200-level classes it’s mostly lecture and we’ll go through primary sources and he’ll explain things to us. We’re tested on the material from the lecture and then use the primary sources to write two essays. In my other 200-level we have readings from both secondary sources and primary sources. She lectures on the secondary source material and then expects us to discuss the primary sources and connect them to the lecture material.</p>
<p>In one 300 level, we have assigned readings, ~150 pages of reading a week (sometimes more/sometimes less) and then we spend the entire class discussing, no lecture. 2-3 students lead the discussion and have discussion questions, and if there’s stuff the student leaders didn’t cover the professor will ask questions about it. My other 300 level is a gen ed requirement, too, so there’s a lot of non-history majors in it and it’s less work. We have mostly primary source readings (some secondary in the beginning, but not really anymore) and then he lectures on the time period/historical context and goes through some of the primary sources, sometimes we have discussions, sometimes he mostly lectures.</p>
<p>It really depends on the professor and how they run class. Generally the higher level the class, the more focused and based on primary sources and discussion it is going to be.</p>
<p>I’m just a freshman, but I definitely think that not ALL college history courses are terrible. I took a French History class this quarter on a whim and it has been the best course I’ve taken in college so far (though, to be fair, I’ve only taken 8 courses, haha) ! The class was mainly composed of lecture (twice a week) but we also had discussion sections once a week, which really helped me to understand the material and get to know my classmates. There was A LOT of reading, but only two exams and no papers, so it wasn’t an unmanageable workload at all.</p>