Today I remembered that I hadn't checked mySLU for my course evals yet, and I'm so glad. This batch made me feel GREAT, because for the first time I didn't have a single bad review! That's especially sweet because I really do think this was my best semester of teaching yet and that I was on top of my game for Spring 2012 History 112. I'm most thrilled about the fact that so many students mentioned that they really liked the reading packets because I worked really hard over winter break trying to find ones that students would connect with, and I was really pleased with the way our discussions of them went. These really help remind me, during a summer of studying and stress and stupid crap, that this is the path I'm meant to be on, because I love teaching history, and dammit, I'm good at it. The first 7 evals are from my Friday 11am class, my favorite class. I'm gonna really miss this next fall.
Amy Boland has by far been one of the best instructors (I view here more as an instructor than a TA) I have had here at SLU. I really loved the structure of the course, and Amy's enthusiasm for teaching and the subject matter made it a great learning experience. She worked hard to help us be successful in the class. It is refreshing to have an instructor who is both knowledgable and good at helping her students understand that knowledge. I found it really helpful when we put key terms up on the board and could discuss them, because it was very easy to miss a piece of information in lecture that someone else might have had. The key terms throughout the semester became good study guides for exams. She also picks out great primary source documents. Those were always my favorite assignments of the week because I actually enjoyed doing it and felt it really related to the class. Great job Amy!
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Amy Boland is the best T.A. I have ever had. She was enthusiastic and loved to teach and made everything easy to understand. She was also very helpful.
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Amy was a great Teaching Assistant. From her tone, it was obvious she was passionate about History. She made herself available through office hours and through email communication. She was helpful and encourage class discussion. The class was enjoyable and very interesting.
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Amy was fantastic!! Without a doubt one of the best educators I have encountered here at SLU. She did an great job of summarizing and organizing important information from the lecture, which makes the "big picture" of the history much more visible, something that is often lost in college courses. Her method of outlining the week's topic within the context of a potential essay question not only established a strong foundation upon which to organize the information, but also proved useful to study for exams with important information already well-organized come test time. I especially appreciated her enthusiasm for the topic and her dedication to expose to us the real side of world history, with first hand accounts and literature, not always focusing on the deadly wars or the stereotypical viewpoints of specific historical events. I will highly recommend Amy to anyone taking this course.
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Excellent Semester with Amy! The readings she chose were amazing, moving, and very interesting!
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Loved Mrs. Boland. Totally prepared me for the midterm, final and essays with our weekly discussions. Great passion for the subject and very helpful.
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appropriate amount of course load, with assignments helping to understand the information. Great TA
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Amy you are so adorable!! I love how much you love history, it is so cute! You really engaged all your students and everyone thought you were so nice. What we did in class helped us learned while also keeping up engage and interesting. You will make a great professor one day!!
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Our TA was very enthusiastic in teaching the material to our class. Also, she was very accessible when it came to reviewing a rough draft of a paper before it was due and providing feedback.
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A great teaching assistant. Passionate about the subject she teaches. Loved the primary source documents. Very helpful with papers and assignments.
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Amy Boland was one of the best teachers I have ever had at SLU. She made history fun to learn and was always available if I needed help. There is nothing I would change about the way she teaches because I enjoyes every minute of it!
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I actually learned a lot, because of this t.a. and the classroom discussions. I learned how to memorize things we learned in the class a bit to speak about them in this discussion as well as actually learning to like history which is a subject I hugely dislike. The reading packets were definitely a plus. The t.a. was really enthusiastic and happy about the subjects and stuff in general that I not only wanted to come to class all the time, but when I did, it sped by quickly because it was a lot of fun.
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I really enjoyed having this TA for both semesters. She is very kind, makes sure everyone gets to add their own imput, and is very enthusiastic. She made History fun, and I found the extra readings assigned for this class to be very helpful for gaining an overall understanding of each time period.
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By far my favorite part of history was discussion simply because Amy was so enthusiastic about her job and she was good with choosing proper readings for weekly discussions. One thing to add to discussions just to make it a little more interesting would be more pictures/video clips/powerpoints or something along those lines to make the visual presentation of events in history more appealing to the students.
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Job well done!
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Keep up the good work.