8 Great, Weird, Bizarre, and Fascinating College Classes

[The Straight Story]

8 Great, Weird, Bizarre, and Fascinating College Classes

1) Santa Clara University offers a class called The Joy of Garbage.

2) Physics professor Michael Dennin teaches a Science of Superheroes class at UC Irvine.

3) If UC Irvine had a soul mate, it would probably be Columbia College, where a course called Zombies in Popular Media is offered.

4) Professor Karim Tiro taught a class at Xavier University called A History of the Pig in America.

5) At Lynn University, students can opt to take a course entitled The Final Four Experience, in which students actually were able to attend the Final Four.

6) Ken Keffer of Centre College lets his students endorphinize and intellectualize simultaneously in his course, The Art of Walking.

7) Though most college students could write their own books on infidelity, at the University of Pennsylvania, they can also take a class called Adultery Novel,

8) There’s just something about bad television that’s irresistible to philosophy professors, which is probably why Professor Linda Wetzel of Georgetown University offers a course called Philosophy and Star Trek.

More info on each at link:
http://www.collegeotr.com/harvard_university/8_great_weird_bizarre_and_fascinating_college_classes_10960

[liberal N proud]

1. All for the bargain price of todays college tuition

I can't imagine justifying student loans and financial aid and then taking classes like that.

[EFerrari]

19. The titles are humorous, not serious.

I think I taught a section called "Bad girls you've never met" about 19th Century novels.

It's partly to make people read about your class and partly to have fun doing the same thing over and over.

[ClassWarrior]

2. Star Trek?? BAD television??

Epic fail.

NGU.

[Bucky]

10. Maybe the writer was referring to TNG

[GreenPartyVoter]

13. No way!

[GreenPartyVoter]

12. For sure!

[Lydia Leftcoast]

3. I bet a lot of these were so-called college seminars

that is, one- or two-credit courses that meet once a week as a kind of dessert for students.

Two sound as if they might have been real courses. The Science of Superheroes could be a means of introducing science-phobic students to the principles of physics. A History of the Pig in America could be an actual course in a Department of Agriculture. I recall seeing a course called "Potatoes" in the catalogue of the University of Minnesota's College of Agriculture.

Another factor is that some colleges do not look kindly upon junior faculty members whose classes have low enrollment, not even if they're in basic departments. For that reason, they try to come up with courses that they believe will attract enrollment from the intellectually numb majority.

[slackmaster]

4. Damn, some of those sound better than Underwater Coin Flipping

Or Nude Basket Weaving.

[eleny]

5. That first one has to be an Archaeology class

[Jim__]

8. More like General Science.

* Joy of Garbage (ENVS 10): a science class for non-science majors that uses waste issues as a backdrop for learning science. Students learn about decomposition, the living organisms in soil that make things rot, the organic chemistry of why garbage stinks, waste issues and sustainability. During the nuclear waste section, students learn about isotopes, radioactivity and the science of assessing risk.

"I like it to be fun," wrote professor Virginia Matzek. "We sort through garbage on the first day of class, and I actually have a closet full of (dry) garbage in my office for that purpose right now. But it's also a serious class that requires people to do research and learn how to work with data."

Students must go on a required field trip. Last year, the class went to the Sunnyvale landfill and to the sewage treatment plant.

Fulfills the Arts & Sciences core requirement for a non-lab science class. 4 units. Course number: 28704

[eleny]

18. Even better!

I've seen some documentaries about archaeologists who go to contemporary garbage dumps looking for more recent info. But that's a great science class. Thanks for the update.

[TechBear_Seattle]

6. Many of these are interesting classes

I expect...

1) Archaeology, which is often times little more than sifting through someone else's garbage. Archaeology is not about the distant past, either: landfills from the late 1800s have been excavated, with a lot of very interesting and informative finds.

2) I've heard of this one. It operates along the lines of, "If people really could start fires with their mind, or fly by jumping into the air, or transform into beasts, this is how they would have to do it." A fascinating approach to science, much like the Christmas lecture series once done by Michael Farady which started with, say, a Christmas candle to launch a lecture on the science of combustion.

3) Classes like this are typically in the literature or art history departments. Odd, but there is clearly enough interest. Personally, I think a class on society as portrayed by Jane Austin is stranger.

4) Xavier University has a noted MBA program, and it is in Ohio. It makes perfect sense that it would teach classes that relate to one of Ohio's major industries: pig agribusiness.

5) When I was in college, I took a weight training class. Basically, I got college credit for regularly showing up at the gym, signing in, and showing progress in how much I could lift. No weirder than that.

6) See 5, and add in the ancient history philosophizing while ambulating, from the Peripatetics of ancient Greece to modern day practices of walking meditation.

7) A literature class about a particular genre. This is just a twist on established classes that focus on Romance novels, Science Fiction or the works of Charlotte Bronte.

8) Gene Roddenberry was very much a philosophical visionary. His future was multi-racial and multi-ethnic, with blacks, women and people of Japanese and Russian ancestry living and working on equal terms with white men. This attitude was quite prominent in Star Trek: The Next Generation when he was allowed free creative reign. A course on on the philosophy of Star Trek is something that, IMO, more people should take.

[XemaSab]

11. Anything over 50 years old is considered historic

You ever read an archaology report?

There's a lot of old cans in them there woods. :o

[TechBear_Seattle]

14. I remember a project to excavate a landfill from the Great Depression

I believe I read about it in "Waste And Want: A Social History of Trash" by Susan Strasser. A research team of grad students excavated a landfill from the early 1930s. One of the remarkable finds was how the garbage mummified rather than rotted, with discarded newspapers still readable and meat scraps such as gristle still identifiable.

[XemaSab]

17. I think capping landfills is a BIG mistake

for that very reason.

[Initech]

7. Here's some that are even crazier than that:

http://www.cracked.com/article_16558_smash-bros-theory-6-absurd-classes-taught-at-actual-colleges.html

[ZombieHorde]

9. Zombies in Popular Media

I would ace this class with ease.
Congratulations, you have found the hidden text!

[BreweryYardRat]

15. I'd love to take #2.

The closest USF ever came was a class on writing comic books. (Signed up for that in a heartbeat.)

Heh. Actually, I think I'm on some government watchlist after that course, since I wrote a couple scripts focusing on a group of protagonists who stole some cutting-edge military cybernetics research and used it to go settle some scores with right-wing extremists around the world. Blowing up KKK rallies, bombing fundamentalist churches and mosques, executing extremist news-anchors and crooked military-industrial CEOs, double-crossing arms dealers, overthrowing Third World dictators, etc... The main conflict involved dealing with the mental/emotional consequences of their actions (a couple wound up committing suicide)...with a persistent subplot about a very Dennis-Kuchinich-esque U.S. President trying (with reasonable success) to stop them. (He wanted to use legal methods of resolving the problems, rather than the brute-force sledgehammer approach.)

[Runcible Spoon]

16. one of my linguistics profs taught a Klingon class

not to actually make you fluent, but it was a fun way to study the construction of languages.

[MrCoffee]

20. I took History of Rock & Roll at UTexas

It was a FASCINATING class. I really enjoyed it.

[ba5500]

21. RE:

Crazy world we live in