I took Hist 161 with Derby and she's a total sweetheart. She does have the tendency to trail off in the middle of sentences and can sometimes be hard to follow, but you get the general themes she trying to express and the class overall was not too difficult. It consisted of a take-home midterm and a take home-final which she gave out weeks in advance and you had a choice of prompts. She loves tons of examples from the books she assigns and shes a pretty lenient grader. I personally loved the class.