This professor is AMAZING! I was worried the material would be boring, but he made it so interesting. I took this class online during COVID and it was 2 weekly recorded lectures with a good amount of readings. However, you do not have to read the readings too closely as most is covered in the lecture. Midterm (short answer style) worth 45% and final (short answer style) worth 55%. Very leniant grader and just wants to know you are watching the lectures and understanding the main points. Very helpful and encouraging professor. TAKE HIM IF YOU CAN!

loved summerhill! chill witty white man. super easy A, interesting lectures, you do not need to do the readings. he presents the lecture like a story or narrative of brazilian history. I learned so much and it was definitely a worthwhile course. exams were very simple, one midterm and one final.

I loved Summerhill! He is hilarious and gives lectures like he's telling you a juicy story with lots of drama, but this makes them super interesting to listen to. He is obviously very passionate about what he's teaching and he really captivates his audience with the way he lectures. He gives you a study guide a week before the midterm (40%) and final (50%) so you know exactly what to study. For the map quiz (10%) he gives you a map with exactly what he will test you on and you just learn that. If you go to lecture and follow along you will definitely do well in this class, he makes it easy to want to learn about the material. He strongly resembles Will Ferrel also. Love that

Summerhill is a great professor. His lectures are engaging, informative, and often funny. Getting an A in this class isn't hard. The map quiz is 10% and it's easy to get a perfect score on it if you study the map. The midterm (40%) and final (50%) are not hard at all. Go to lecture, take notes, and review the study guide and you'll get an A. The tests are mostly multiple choice with 1 or 2 bluebook answers. The readings do help, but you don't need to do them. I would definitely recommend this class. He is also hilarious and looks/ acts like Will Ferrell.

Summerhill is an AMAZING professor. Lectures are interesting and he is super funny. Map Quiz 10%, Midterm 40%, Final 50%. If you need an easy history class take this, or even as a GE. There are a couple of books he wants you to read but you don't need to read anything until the final. Light work. No assignments, which is nice and honestly he makes everything super clear in lecture. Would definitely recommend.

Professor Summerhill teaches in a straightforward way, but at the same time he keeps your interest. He puts on slides that mostly serve as a guiding point, but the majority of lecture is him going over the lesson orally. That can make it a little difficult to follow along, especially if he changes the topic abruptly, but it is not too difficult to discern if you are paying attention.

Exams were very straightforward. The map quiz was worth 10% of your grade, and that was just memorizing the map that the professor provided. Midterm and final were multiple choice questions. Again, I would say that most of the answers are something you can find in your notes, although there were a few questions from the readings that did pop up. The provided study guides were lists of potential terms.

Summerhill emphasized that the best process to prepare for the exams would be to answer Who, What, Where, When, Why and How for each of the terms. This would serve two purposes, the first would be that if you had knowledge of these terms in this sense, you could narrow down your multiple choice answers to the correct one. The second purpose would be that you could use these facts to organize a coherent essay. Summerhill says that he randomly selects a study term and you are to write a short essay on it. He mentioned that if the randomly selected term did not have too much to write about it, that you would write two short essays. Luckily that never happened in this class.

The essay part of the exams weren't too hard. My process was to organize the facts from what I had memorized and write a coherent chronology of events (with the dates if possible) about the term and why they mattered. The who, what, where, when why and how really saved my butt on the midterm and final.

Professor Summerhill doesn't make it hard to stay focused, he was always walking around and tossing in funny anecdotes. If you can follow along and write good, detailed notes about what he covers, then you should be good. There were no tricks to this class, everything was laid out as directly and straightforward as possible.

Attendance was not taken, but if you missed out on a day you would have to ask a classmate for the notes. The slides were posted online, but they were just powerpoints of the talking points that the professor went over. If you just utilized those without notes from the day, you would be missing a lot of the bulk of the topic.

Overall: If you don't mind taking notes for 90 minutes and listening to interesting topics about Brazil, told by someone who is funny, engaging and interesting, then by all means take this class. Some history classes can be dense and make it hard to push through. This class is not one of them. If you do your part, study study study and follow along, you will be fine. I studied flashcards of the terms a few days before the exams and I ended up with an A in the class. I copied my notes verbatim to what was being lectured and that was worth GOLD! If you can do something similar you will be good to go!

GREAT class, GREAT professor, he was SO funny and his lectures were ALL engaging. No electronics allowed, but believe me, you will be very interested in the material. He tells you everything like if it were a story. He's VERY nice and ALWAYS available by email/office hours. Midterm and Final are multiple choice (easy ones), and a short essay about a general topic of the class so theres a LOT to write. Exams are shorter than the time posted so there's enough time for them. HIGHY recommend taking ANY class with him

This was my favorite history class I've taken so far at UCLA (I'm a history major). Summerhill is always entertaining -- the way he lectures is like telling a story -- but also concise and knowledgeable. The tests are SO easy (10% map quiz, 40% midterm, 50% final) -- go to lecture, take good notes and you'll be fine. If you get a chance, take this class with Summerhill: he's funny, the subject is interesting, and the class is not time consuming.

Best professor at UCLA. Hilarious & enjoyable lectures.

First off, I gotta ask: Am I the only one that felt like I was being taught by Will Ferrell? Seriously, from his facial features to his mannerisms he reminded me so much of Will Ferrell. It was pretty weird, but pretty cool at the same time.

Anyway, as far as this class goes, it was great. The structure was awesome: midterm (50%) & Final (50%). You're given a list of 20 or so terms to study for a week before the exam, and as long as you take really good notes and study everything that has to do with the terms on the study guide you'll be fine. There were about 40 multiple choice questions, and then he randomly choose 1 of the terms and you have to write a paragraph about it and hit on around 7 things relating to the term he chose.

The midterm he made was probably too easy, but I think he tried to compensate for that by making the wording for the final extra difficult. I thought that was somewhat unfair, since it wasn't like he was asking us to KNOW more, rather just creating trickier worded questions.

All in all though it was a great class. His lectures were probably some of the best structured and easy to follow history lectures I've ever had (and I'm a history major). He's also a really nice and funny guy, so he's easily approachable if you have any questions. Definitely take the class if you get a chance.