Intro to Hispanic Culture

Took her class last semester at Barnard and loved her. She's very friendly and super understanding. A lot of the class revolves around the readings and class or group discussions about them. If you don't really understand or the class is silent (i.e. no one read) she'll push you in the right direction or frame the questions in a way that make it easier to talk about. The syllabus was pretty interesting too - for the art section she had us go to a museum exhibit and write our essay on how it tied into what we were discussing in class; another section included watching telenovelas.

This class was a cultural studies class, so basically it involves a lot of sitting around and staring at eachother until someone who has actually done the reading says something ensightful. Other days no one says anything because the readings are often so difficult to get through that we spend the entire class going over them and breaking down the sentences into smaller units to squeeze an ounce of meaning out of the colvolution that is the essay. This is not, however, the professor's fault, since he cannot control the syllabus for this class. Adam was really nice and even funny sometimes, and wanted to encourage people to speak even if they were uncomfortable with their ability to articulate themselves. The nice thing about having difficult readings in this class is that you are not expected to fully understand them (atleast the more difficult later ones), so if you do you are impressive. The topics covered are also quite interesting - art, graffiti, popular culture, nationalism, even some Marxist theory thrown in. Overall it was a pretty pleasant experience.

Ok, so I am in the middle of taking this class right now that is now a part of the Spanish and Latin American Cultures major. I already had to make a review since it is burning a whole in my soul to see these wonderful reviews of Teresa.
Where to begin?
The material: Art, Cultura popular, nationalism, etc have dominated the themes of the course. Well one might ask, well that doesnt sound to bad (those themes can easily be applied to Latin America)? WRONG! We have read more Foucault and Marx than we have Borges, de las Casas, and Garcia Marquez. The worst part: we NEVER relate the texts to current, past, or reoccuring incidences. The texts are given life and left to die on the table at the hands of ignorant students who make comments like, "El graffiti es la arte de la clase baja." RIIIGHT? Ok let's look at structure...
Structure: Each week the topics can vary from boring to downright excrutiating. The worse part: we are supposed to have an opinion on every minute detail since class participation is a whopping 35%. For example, we were trying to classify whether Duchamp's urinal display in a gallery is actually art...two things need to be said for that: 1. Hello, Spanish and Latin American cultures, where are you? 2. Really who gives a...well you know? The Prof:
Ha! She is a seemingly nice woman from Argentina originally who likes Spanish and topics relating to Spain and Latin America. She is young and energetic. One might ask well this is something that is good about the class...WRONG! She is strict in all the wrong ways such as page length on the weekly essays (2 pages exactly no more, no less) and constant rehashing grammar that I don't think is necessary or helpful. She never questions someone's random opinion in order to push him or her farther in discussion, obviously stemming from not reading, even so far as allowing people to spew what I think are racist, bigoted, not thought out, and overwhelmingly sheltered opinions. The comments die on the table like the rest of this horrendous class.
This is supposed to be a 3000 level course, can anyone tell me why the majority of it is freshmen and people do not have a command of the Spanish language in order to communicate their ideas in their entirety. Although, this probably wouldnt matter anyway since it is...just....so....boring.