In The Devil in the White City, one thing I never noticed was any signs or mention of segregation, discrimination, or really any African Americans. This is something that sort of made me think deeper about the book because I realize that the fair was not long after the Civil War and the north and south still had tension. It makes me wonder if the Exposition had any African American attendees, if so, I also wonder how they were treated by the Americans from all over the country and from people around the world. I do realize that Chicago is up North, so it may not have been as big of an issue as say St. Louis, but it is interesting to speculate.

I was also very impressed with how the city of Chicago was able to overcome such obstacles as the country still recuperating from the Civil War, the city being rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1871, poor soil to build on in most places, and many other obstacles. It was definitely an incredible feat to be able to overcome all of the obstacles that the planners had to and also to create the biggest and greatest fair the world had ever seen, while also being the first world exposition to turn a profit mind you.

I think this section of History 100 with its particular mix of content, activities, and assignments would be much better taught as a face-to-face course. The reason why is because I know I seem to work better in a class setting, being able to work on and get help/feedback on assignments in a class, and the visual learning would be better for me at least. I did like the flexibility of being able to work on the assignments whenever I could during the week and not being obligated to go to a class though. Overall I think this class would be better taught face-to-face because it would involve more interaction between the student taking the course, the professor teaching it to the student(s), and more feedback/constructive criticism.

 

I have for the most part enjoyed this course and like the fact that it was a bit different than classes I have taken in the past. I feel that it is always hard to change the way we learn/teach as I went to school in the 90’s and it was very heavy with you learn the information, test on it, and then move on to the next. I know that it has not changed from that mindset and is in fact worse with the no child left behind testing that is now applied. School has become so regimented for everyone that it has lost a lot of the practicality and thinking that should go behind it. With that said when we do have opportunities to think and be creative the majority of us don’t know what to do and it is usually very hard. Then, we end up having to go back to the same old mindset so it is quite an inconvenience to change the way we think for 4 months and have to put in double the work because we are so use to having everything laid out and regimented.

I do not feel that school prepares you for the workforce, I say this because it has become so regimented and usually there is not a lot of thinking involved it is learn this concept, test, dump it because you have to learn the next concept. Too much information is being taught in such a short amount of time that the actuality of retaining everything is very small. From my experience you get a baseline understanding from school and each position you get you will have to learn the culture and the way that they do business.

I did enjoy the diversity of material that was gone over in this course. I was not sure what to expect with the name but I love history and figured I would give it a shot. From thinking about the way historians analyze, to water and then to the worlds fair. It was really great material and even as hard as it was for me ,as I am not a creative person, I do feel that I learned a lot more from this course and will actually remember it.

I don’t think it matters if this class is taught face-to-face or online. I think it should be known from the beginning that this class is taught differently, the assignments need to be more spread out, and more feedback and grade needs to be given throughout the course. I think the hard thing about “creative” learning is the subjectivity of it. We are told to voice our thoughts or opinions and use a medium we want to use to express the information and then we are graded by an instructor that has their own set of thoughts. I hope that in some way this may help going forward. Thanks for the interesting class, it really did make me step outside of my comfort zone and made me think about things differently.

Over the course of this semester I have learned more than I expected in this class. In the beginning of the semester I came into this class with the expectation of a normal history class. I imagined having a lot of reading and memorization over broad topics in human history, and then be tested over material I had little interest in. This class forced me to analyze history in a way I have never really done before. This type of critical thinking allowed me to gain a new level of understanding and appreciation for various topics I would usually just skim through and never truly learn the information. This class allowed me to not only improve on my writing, but also let me progress on the type of thinking I go through when analyzing information. Overall, history 100 was much more than I expected and allowed me to grow as a learner.

The best way to teach this course would be face to face. Over the semester there were lots of information to sift through and I think face to face interaction would help students understand the expectations of assignments better. There were a lot of times where I did not exactly understand the expectations of some assignments and being in class would have been more beneficial for my type of learning. Having this course online made me truly understand the material and forced me to analyze information more than I would have to in a regular class setting. Having face to face interaction allows me to gain more perspective on the topics we cover not only from the professor, but also from my peers; only so many ideas and perspectives can be learned from exchanging blog posts.