Ugh. Great at first, but maybe a month in the plateau turns into a cliff.

So AFS 201 is supposedly about learning about agriculture as a system/set of systems. What that really means is that Holly pulls in guest speakers to talk about a whole host of random topics that usually relate to ag (and rarely lectures herself).

Holly treats students like community college dropouts and grad students in the same breath: a month to prep for a research essay, but a week to go from outline to essay; a month to create a podcast with an ag producer, but it needs to be of good enough quality that a company would actually publish it. She definitely plays favorites according to participation, but stay on her good side and you might get a decent rec letter out of it (TBD).

The only thing close to an exam in this course are short essay question style “writing prompts” every month or so. Taking notes is a complete waste of time as the prompts are open note open book and on Canvas. There’s also weekly discussions through PackBack that correlate with the chapters in the textbooks (yup, 2 textbooks) and/or the lectures that week. If you’re not familiar, PackBack an AI-graded system that gives pointers as you type a post. It can be helpful but after I got multiple 100pt posts ~which Holly said she’d never seen~ I lost interest. In terms of workload: the only weekly work is PackBack. There are 4 writing prompts total in the semester. There’s the research paper (5-8pgs). And finally the podcast (10-15mins). There’s also a handful (5?) of random group assignments s...read more