Michele Langstaff

I took Ms. Langstaffs class in Spring 03. She was professional, articulate, nice, approachable, and has a lot of prior management experience.

This was a huge class, held in an auditorium with 600-700 students. Ms. Langstaff had a lot of credibility because of her personality & experience, & by the way she dressed. She always wore nice looking outfits. Even the graduate assistants dressed up a bit, adding further to the credibility of the class.

The course grade was determined by only three 50-question multiple-choice exams of equal weight. There were a very limited number of extra-credit opportunities, & I strongly suggest trying to get these points. I did, & it actually bumping my course grade up higher.

Good things about the class included the textbook, Introducing Management (Schermerhorn & Chappell), which was really good because it was short, easy to read and concise.

There were a number of frustrating negative downsides with the class. First, if you have had management experience, youll probably find a lot of the topics boring. I did. In fact, much of the material presented was rather boring (uninteresting theories and concepts). If Ms. Langstaff had offered more interesting and even shocking examples when teaching about them, a lot of the semester would have been more interesting. Yet only a small number of examples were given.

One bad thing that I thought unacceptable was that writing on the exams was strictly not allowed. Even though they were multiple-choice, personally, I like and need to write on tests. My paid tuition dollars should have allowed for exams that come with the courtesy of being written on. As for the difficulty of the exams, they each had several questions which were too detailed and clearly irrelevant (nit-picky) to any reasonable learning environment; questions that were not a fair assessment of my comprehension of the course material.

Another negative thing thing about the class were the Q&A times when Ms. Langstaff would ask the class questions. It was agonizing when questions to the class would too often elicit lame, stupid, and long-winded comments from students (not always, but most of the time). She didnt have a really good dynamic as a speaker in prompting students to give interesting, thoughtful, and quick responses. And because she often spoke in a monotone voice, it often was hard to realize that she asked a question to the class, and so there were times when no one would even respond to her questions (remember, this is a huge class).

The classroom atmosphere (auditorium) was decent, and it was nice to arrive early to listen to music that the grad students played. But it was often a letdown when Ms. Langstaff would start class, speaking without much vocal variety (often monotone) after hearing good music. Also, an unfortunate and big problem at times, was that the quality of the microphone Ms. Langstaff used was bad, and it was unfortunate and disappointing that nothing was ever done to correct the technical problems. One other thing was that after hearing good music before class, often accompanied by cool graphics, the PowerPoint presentation looked terribly boring once class got underway, with their simple and boring black & white appearance.

Still though, Im glad I had Ms. Langstaff for this class. With some refinement in her presentation style and improvement in the exams, microphone, and PowerPoint slides, this class could become dynamic and fun.