What’s the strangest
class you have ever taken?
On slow news days you’ll often read stories about strange new college courses being offered in the humanities (they are virtually ALWAYS humanities courses) department of some college/university. For example, this post about a University of Missouri course dedicated to the famous rivalry/relationship of hip-hop superstars Kanye West and Jay-Z.
The general tone of such articles is almost always one of thinly-veiled snark–“Hey, can you believe someone is paying to learn this shit?” but I tend to finish them wishing I had more classes like this available to me back when I could barely be bothered to attend my own chosen secondary institution of learning.
I was a film studies major (what was I going to do with a film studies degree? Probably the exact same thing I’m doing now, without a film studies degree), so you would think I would have more potentially head-scratching classes to choose from, but the best I can offer up was the course I took on the films of Clint Eastwood.
Now, today this sounds like a pretty reasonable class. The dude is a two-time Oscar-winning director who is probably as well-known by younger folks as a filmmaker as he is a movie star. But this was 1995 and–despite his success with Unforgiven–was still thought of by most folks as a monosyllabic action movie star who was only marginally more talented than Sylvester Stallone.
But my professor, Bill Beard, believed there was enough evidence at the time for Eastwood to be given the analysis virtually everyone agrees he is due nearly 20 years later. It was a good class and I learned a lot, but ultimately any course where you get credit for watching Dirty Harry is going to get my full thumbs-up.
That said, some of you must have taken some pretty out there classes. Which ones first come to mind?
“Sex Week” during grad school… It was a weeklong series of lectures, conferences, and small discussion groups about all permutations of sexual relationships….the most memorable (aside from all the 1970s porn-like films of various kinds of couples having sex) was a panel of people who were into weird fetishes…there was a dominatrix, Ava Turell, and her submissive, describing how he loved her whipping him while he was wearing women’s panties strapped to a sail mast out in the open water….there was also “Rubber Man” who described how much he loved latex and rubber and how his fetish stemmed from wearing… Read more »
I took “Queer Sexuality in the Bible”. That was awesome. SOme thought it was weird.
“Man Love in Literature” I think was one, about male relationships. Lots of Faulkner.…
“Gender in Music” that was a reallllly interesting class actually.
You get the drift of how my college education went.
WAIT! I also took “Media Sex” which was about sexualized violence in the media.
Thank you, UCLA. I love you and I miss you. 😉
I had an honors astronomy course in college that was so difficult, the class began with forty or so students and ended up with twelve of us sticking it out after the professor flunked everyone on the first two exams. Not exactly a GPA booster!
I took a class that was actually called “Math for Poets.” I shit you not.
2b + -2b = ?
In Freshman year of college, The Chicago Art Institute, we had what was called a “foundations” class which was to get us to think outside the box, and that it did. All of the projects were bizarre at best. example of one project? “Art in Food” … some would think you’d be photographing, painting, sculpting or drawing something related to food but that’s not what it was. One student presented “Eat like a champion.” What it entailed was the students would eat Cheerios out of a bowl on the floor. Eat like a champion was that we would eat like… Read more »