This morning CNN is linking to a post at Mental Floss that highlights 22 "fascinating and bizarre" college courses this semester of a varied sort. I've selected a few for flava, but was wondering if you'd ever taken or taught a class that might one day fit on a similar list. I hate to admit that I teach stuff that sounds like it was torn out of a college catalog from 1960, never changing, canon-based sorts of things.
But I do have my eyes open for something that will wake me up - not to mention my "young charges."
- Sociology of Fame and Lady Gaga-University of South Carolina
- Zombies in Popular Media-Columbia College Chicago
- Cyborg Anthropology-Lewis & Clark College
- How to Watch Television-Montclair State
- The Phallus-Occidental College
- The American Vacation-University of Iowa
- Goldberg's Canon: Makin' Whoopi-Bates College
I once took a class called Totalitarianism in Books and Film and it was an amazing exploration of fascist movies, propaganda pamphlets, plays, and novels that support or parodied totalitarianism. Remains one of my favorite courses still today.
ReplyDeleteI heard of a professor teaching literary theory using Harry Potter books. Again, I think that would be really interesting. I own a book on the Simpsons that explores philosophical ideas presented in the course of some early episodes and Kant never seemed so alive as in that collection of essays.
I think there is something very exciting about using alternative materials to teach our courses. It just takes so much goddamned red tape to get it approved.
I teach an SF lit/film course that I've subtitled "More Human Than Human" since I'm interested in AI and technology in general and the ways that authors and directors examine what it means to be human in an engineered age.
ReplyDeleteUsually the class fills to capacity. School starts a week from tomorrow and I have 18 open spots. It doesn't seem to matter how dazzling I make the description (or whether the word "film" is in the course title): if the class involves reading, they're only going to take it if nothing else is available.
Things to Come, indeed. Cf. "Idiocracy".
@Compound Calico
ReplyDeleteThe classes you listed are the sort the "conservatives" whine about first whan they complain about how college is going to seed, so you are lucky (unless you teach about homosexuality in Shakespearian plays and sonnets, then they track you down and complain even more "for damaging the Canon" or some other nonsense.)
Not that I give what the mouthbreathers think....
cue inappropriate filter:
ReplyDelete"Every class I teach is a class about the phallus."
I saw this on an R1 transcript I was reviewing this morning: Vampires in Slavic Culture
ReplyDeleteI had a student who wanted to do an independent study with me in which he would explore art, literature and music for signs and symbols of the coming apocalypse, which he and his archangel minions would be heading up.
ReplyDeleteOh, did I mention that he believed he was an other-worldly being sent by a vengeful deity to punish humanity for our evil ways?
@Annie Oakley, I had one like that, too, except she believed she had a tail and a pet dragon. Where are they coming from, and why am I not teaching a class on the Apocalypse???
ReplyDeleteFavorite 'useless' class in college: International Food Aesthetics (yes, we ate at different ethnic restaurants around the Bay Area).
Vampires are passe, and zombies close to being so. Maybe the Apocalypse is the next big thing?
ReplyDeleteThe list of supposedly-absurd course titles is a staple of back-to-school coverage nationwide, just as the list of supposedly-absurd MLA panel titles was a perennial bit of filler for the paper of whatever city that particular academic juggernaut landed in during the week between Christmas and New Year's (perhaps another good reason for moving the MLA to January: a bit less, or less prominent, humanities-bashing in the press).
Harvard once had an excellent course called "rats, lice, and history," which covered the plague from a variety of perspectives. I believe it was created before the AIDS epidemic became obvious, but it fit that era very well. I'm not sure how many courses with catchy titles actually succeed, however; a really good teacher can communicate something about his/her subject through any of a number of cultural/thematic lenses (pop- or not), but, in the hands of a less-gifted teacher, I suspect such attempts often fall flat, and/or become the gut courses students expect them to be.
@Prickly: literary theorists have expanded their territory just a bit since the heyday of Freudian (and Lacanian) criticism: now every class they teach is about the (whole) body.