ST104OL - Critical Review

ST104OL - Summer's Unfinished Business

 

It took a little while to get over my jetlag after a nice little family holiday in August, but now I'm home and getting back into the groove of a new school year for the kids.  I realized though, that I had a little unfinished business in posting a critical review of my ST104 summer class.  So with the kids tucked neatly into bed this evening, I've got a little time to share some of my thoughts on the course and how things went.

ST104OL - Soteriology

For my previous reviews, I've simply gone point by point through various aspect of the course before summarizing my overall experience.  I think I'm going to change it up a bit this time and give the summary first and then get into some of the finer points.  For each aspect of the course, I'll use a five-point grading scale with 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest.  Hopefully, this will give you a better idea of the overall experience.

 

Summary Ratings for ST104:

 

Satisfaction with Professor	5
Satisfaction with Graduate Teaching Assistant	5
Satisfaction with Selected Texts	4
Satisfaction with Time Commitment	4
Satisfaction with Class Interactions	4
Quality of Assignments	5
Difficulty of Grading	4.5
Fairness of Grading	5
Amount of New Material Learned	3
Difficulty of Course	3
Overall Satisfaction	4.5

This is the second time that I've taken Dr. Kreider for a course at DTS and you'll remember that I really enjoyed learning from him in ST101OL.  So I had pretty high expectations for this class.  Besides, Soteriology is an area of the Christian faith that I've invested a lot of my own personal time studying.  Therefore, I can safely say that Dr. Kreider more than met my expectations.

It's important to realize though that Dr. Kreider's teaching style and assignments are geared towards serious students.  This is another course which requires deep thinking and Dr. Kreider isn't one to spoonfeed students material.  He (and the GTA) also expect that any assertions or positions taken during the interactions and assignments to be well supported and defended.  Technically, this requires a modicum of discipline and in my humble opinion, is good for everyone to learn how to do.

Hands down, I found this course much less work than ST101OL but no less enjoyable.  There isn't anywhere near as much reading for this course and in fact, I think Dr. Kreider could probably squeeze another text into the course without overly burdening students.  That said, the emphasis in this course is on the quality of work developed, rather than on the quantity.  This was very evident in the grading of the assignments which was far more strict than in any of my other classes to date.

One interesting thing for me was the fact that I didn't learn a tremendous amount of new material in this course.  As I mentioned previously, this is an area that I have an interest in personally, so I brought a lot of knowledge into the course with me.  What I did appreciate, however, is being exposed to a plethora of writers and perspectives which expanded my understanding of differing positions and introduced me to a number of very interesting works by authors I've not previously read much.  I'm very thankful for that last point and I'm scratching my head as to how in all my reading, I've never really read much by John Owen.  While not on the required text list, Owen's works were in the course bibliography and it was cool to find those resources online for my own enjoyment!

Despite being an excellent course, there were some things I didn't like or rather things I struggled with a bit.  To be fair, this may have simply been a function of the compressed summer schedule, but 45% of the final course grade was due on the last day of class; two big writing assignments and one final exam.  That meant there was a lot riding on the last two weeks of the semester and any slip-ups would spell disaster.  All the assignments were really interesting, educational, and quite frankly fun.  But it would have been nice if things were perhaps spread out a little bit more as to not have so much work due at the very end of the course.  In fact, as much as one third of my total time spent on this course was invested in the final week to ten days of the class (summer semester was 14 weeks).  So the workload at the end of the course was significant to say the least.  Averaged out though, I spent about 9 hours a week working on this class which is perfect workload.

 

So How Did I Do?

 

Please keep in mind that I am only a part-time student and have taken only three credits during this summer semester.

As always, I set high expectations for myself and perhaps more so in this course because of my respect for the professor and my passion for this particular subject.  I had a few nailbiting days waiting for the final grades of my work to be posted, but when it was all said and done I received an A in the course.  Once again, the work I submitted will be helpful for me far beyond the context of this course which is one of the things I love about Dr. Kreider's classes.  Who knows, perhaps I'll have an opportunity to take him again, but we'll just have to see how things shake out in the coming years.