| 02/25/2013 | 1830 - Classical Intellectual Jewish History |  | 3.2 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Yes | First of all, R' Elman may be the most insanely knowledgeable person you will meet in your life. The man knows Shas cold, and that's only one small part of the voluminous information stored in that man's head. The class is worth taking if only to witness this in person. Second of all, I personally found him to be a very nice and friendly person, and I'd also recommend this class if only to open up a line of communication with him. However, in terms of a class, he's kind of the classic brilliant but disorganized professor, the class sort of meanders about, and he is constantly distracted by getting into arguments with members of the class about anything from American politics (he is a staunch liberal, his audience, not so much), to the state of Orthodoxy (he is no fan of the Haredi world). Additionally, the amount that you learn in his class is limited by the fact that a lot of the MYP students, perhaps encouraged by the atmosphere of the class which I described above, will start arguing with the points he wants to make on the intellectual nature of some of the stuff in Shas, and the class becomes him just quoting numerous gemaras baal peh in order to counter their arguments. Which is fun to watch, but it cuts into a lot of time, and its frustrating because this yeshiva guy is bringing questions from a tosefta to a guy who has written books on the subject, while you're waiting to hear his thoughts on other subjects.
A word about helpfulness: As I mentioned, I found him to be a very nice guy, which included being responsive to questions about my paper (that's another thing, also: If given a choice between a paper and test, like my class was, take the paper. According to all the other ratings, his tests often have no correspondence which was actually taught), so personally I found him to be very helpful. On the other hand, I heard from a lot of my classmates that he wasn't as helpful. (I get the feeling he is more helpful if he likes you, and we happened to get along, so I suppose try to get on his good side.) Additionally, when I emailed him my paper, he emailed me a week later, way after it was due, asking me where it was. I had definitely sent it, and to the right email. I don't know if that was the fault of the email service, or his fault, but the latter would not be tremendously out of character, which obviously would be a problem if he did that more than once. That said, I still think it was worth taking, if only to get to see genius at work and open up a line of communication with him. If those are things you value, I recommend taking him for anything. If those are things you couldn't care less about, you're probably better off not taking him. |  |
