ARTH 1441 with Spieth was overall a miserable experience. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
Spieth himself wasn't a bad guy. He was a little strange, but that’s whatever.
The class itself was a huge borefest. Nothing interesting in the least. Every day you went in, sat down, and watched painting after painting flick by on the powerpoint as Spieth talked about the subject matter and the era it was painted in.
Even if this material was interesting, listening would be pretty pointless. The majority of it wasn’t going to be on the exam. His exams were only 25 questions long for huge periods of time. This leaves you with huge portions of material studied and memorized that you wouldn’t need to know. For example, you have to memorize 100-150 paintings along with their artist/date/medium/etc. for every exam, but only about 15-20 paintings would be on the exam. The rest of the exam consisted of random vocabulary words or time period questions.
Aside from that, at the beginning of the semester, Spieth said that we would have an attendance grade at the end of the semester. We were told to sign a sheet of paper at the beginning of each class to receive our points. It is currently the end of the semester and we are receiving no such grade. One can only guess that we were blatantly lied to.
If you need a gen ed art credit, go with a theatre class. I hear plenty of good things about those. This class really was just not a good experience and I recommend doing what you can to avoid it. If you do take it, don’t go to class. All of the powerpoints get put on moodle, so you can just study the paintings on your own time and go to the tests, which dates are listed on the syllabus.
