Memorable college courses

In My Humble Opinion
1

Kayaker’s post on a different thread reminded me of a handful of memorable undergrad courses I took. Some of them were memorable for the sheer volume of work, and others were memorable due to the subject matter. Yet others, were memorable based on the personality of the professors.

I did, however, note a pattern in some the elective courses I took. Frequently, the ones that seemed on the surface like they might be the most fun turned out to be quite disappointing, perhaps due to the expectations surrounding them. A handful of times, though, I managed to strike gold and ended up taking courses that might sound dull on their face but turned out to be quite the opposite (air photo interpretation lab, I’m looking at you!)

For whatever reasons you might have, what are the college courses you remember most years afterwards?

2

I took a Sociology course to fulfill a humanities requirement. The professor was a disaster. He had a drinking problem. He would show up for the 11 am lecture reeking of gin. He had a teaching assistant who he was involved with (he was in his 50s, she in her 20s).

He was such a weird character that I went out of my way to go up and ask a question after lecture. Rather than answer my question, he suggested I tag along while he got his lunch. I had a burger and a beer. He helped himself to my fries while downing 3 gin & tonics. He picked up the tab!!

I got an A for the course. The midterm was straightforward. For the final, a friend gave me a copy of the previous year’s final exam as a study guide (he got it from a fraternity). The lazy lush gave the exact same final exam as he did the previous year, not even bothering to correct a typo.

3

I attended a very conservative Christian college. The college hired a history professor who was an Iraq war veteran and thrived on edginess. He’d show photos of men kissing on the lips in history class, constantly focus on the most salacious details of things in history possible. Students loved him and when a journalist visited college one day, wanting to sit in on a class, everyone insisted she sit in on his.

Another professor, a physics guy, taught the most memorable thing in science - he drew a flat line that suddenly shot upwards at the end, and pointed out that it was human history - that for millennia we were nothing but herding cows, farming, riding horses, then suddenly shot upwards exponentially in the last 300 years.

4

Of all the courses that have stuck with me, my Nietzsche courses stuck with me the most. I started with a freshman seminar, which was an elective requirement for people in my program. So maybe 12 people to a class. Up until that point I had been a devout Christian in the middle of a crisis of faith, and well, let’s just say that Nietzsche speaks to you when you’re having a crisis of faith.

He opened the seminar by disseminating the following quote:

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

I’d never read the quote in context, before (well, with more context - the real context wouldn’t come until later in the course.) I just remember thinking, “Shit, that’s exactly what it feels like. Straying through an infinite nothing.”

The professor of the course, well he was something else. An Oxford-educated guy with a Boston accent, who wore horrific sweaters. I mean the worst you can imagine. He couched everything not only in the context of the work, but Nietzsche’s life, such that I’m convinced you can’t really understand his philosophy very well without understanding his experience.

I know so many random fucking anecdotes about Nietzsche now. For example, he was catatonic in his later life, probably due to syphilis, and his sister in law used to wheel him out in front of people and charge them to see him. One day, when she was talking about his books, he looked up wistfully and said, “I once wrote books.”

I ended up taking two more courses with Nietzsche in them, taught by that same professor. The first was called 1889: Nietzsche’s Final Year and Descent into Madness (I mean that is a baller course title, am I right?) That’s where we learned all the shit about Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche and what an exploitative evil Nazi she was. The other class was Intro to Existentialism, so we read more than just Nietzsche. We read some Camus and some Sartre and some Conrad and a book I really loved called The Confusions of Young Torless.

The prof told us before we began the existentialism course, “If you have any tendency toward depression, maybe rethink taking this.” I did actually have to withdraw at the end of the course due to depression. But I’m glad I hung in as long as I did, some of the coolest stuff I’ve ever read/discussed.

I don’t really know what to say, beyond that these courses profoundly influenced my worldview and still feel relevant to me today, twenty years later. In contrast, I look at my old philosophy papers from 17th and 18th Century Philosophy and I don’t understand a damn thing I wrote.

5

Funny you mention philosophy courses. I wasn’t a philosophy major, but I ended up taking several philosophy classes on the strength of the 101 class I took as an elective. The prof was REAL GOOD and taught the course using the Socratic method. He made short work of all the freshmen, but still he managed to make it fun to be ‘defeated’ by him. You positively wanted to engage in that class

6

Sophomore year I had an algebra class with a Chinese professor who had just come from teaching in Switzerland. His accent was impenetrable. Worse, we finally figured out halfway through that the pre-requirements in Switzerland were completely different, so that he was assuming we had entire courses we hadn’t yet taken. I was a math major but this did me in and I switched to Political Science the next year.

Seconf semester senior PoliSci majors took a seminar that had us reading three books a week and then discussing them from three hours on Friday. Three serious, usually 300-500 pages books. Every week. From what I hear, students today would simply think I’m making that up.

7

I was in the opposite situation. I wanted to take Intro to Philosophy and was advised against it because I had already completed three philosophy courses. So I jumped straight into upper level formal philosophy classes with no preparation and damned near drowned.

There is a world of difference between Nietzsche and Hume. I don’t know why they thought one would inform the other.

At any rate, I was almost a major in philosophy. I managed to learn quickly and do pretty well in formal philosophy until I got to symbolic logic. I had no idea what the hell was going on in that class, realized it was going to take an inordinate amount of time and effort to learn, and I dropped philosophy as a major. I had planned to double major but I switched my double major so many times I finally just went with the thing I never changed - Spanish.

I had some memorable Spanish courses as well.

I remember a lot of my classes in fact. They were all so interesting to me.

8

Not college, but Jr. High. Once a week, a social studies teacher read Kurt Vonnegut to the class.

He turned me into a life long reader.

9

Art school: the painting/printmaking/sculpture disciplines were openly dismissive of the “knotters & potters” studios as just being a bunch of girls in their gossipy sewing circle. But I’d already picked up a lot of the basics from my mom, and it seemed like a good place to meet women, so I went into Fiber Arts. Artistically it expanded my vocabulary in ways I hadn’t expected (although the second motive backfired and my love life only became more complicated). However, it did liberate me from the sausage fest where the upper-body strength required for pouring bronze into a mold or manhandling a lithography stone supposedly placed you in command of expressing the human condition.

10

“History of Presidential Crisis” was just the usual freshman year U.S. history course, but the prof. made it engaging on levels I wasn’t even aware of at the time. Never to be forgotten, on the first day of class he handed out the syllabus and announced: “As you can see, there was reading assigned for today so you are already behind.”

11

That is a really beautiful sentiment.

12

My most memorable college courses were psychology-related. For some people, math makes perfect sense. For me, it’s always been the study of human behavior. I must be in the 1% of people who actually enjoyed his statistics class.

13

One time in college I overheard a biology instructor giving a lecture. She saw me looking around the crack of the doorway listening to her lecture. She came up to the door and said ‘Are you listening to me? Nobody else is. You should take this class.’ I was thrilled and sat down, taking other coursework as a result of that class so it changed my life.

14

I’m not really a math superfan. I was a Spanish major. But I enjoyed statistics class too. I have enjoyed every math class I’ve ever taken. My husband is a clinical psychologist and understands statistics on a level I never will, though.

The thing that still gets me is astronomy. I had an astronomy class which I was fairly interested in, but I found a lot of it impenetrable. I almost started a thread about “things you will never understand” prompted by the thread about the longest day. I don’t remember anything I learned in that class. I remember at one point asking the professor to explain synchronous rotation to me, and he did, using 3-D objects, and I still didn’t get it.

There are two classes I wish I had taken. Economics and physics.

15

I took a special course on the Holocaust taught by a history professor and literature professor.

The history professor’s family had left Germany just before Jewish immigration was stopped.

It was a good course. I struggled more with the Holocaust literature. There were poems and first-person accounts. Some of it was difficult reading. There was also many celebrations of life. The authors appreciated the smaller details in life like warm sunshine and wild flowers in the camps. The contrast between their daily abuse and what they still appreciated was striking.

Many people are surprised that there is a large amount of Holocaust literature.

16

My favorite was a graduate level computer architecture course I took my senior year. Being MIT, we got lectures from Gordon Bell, Gordon Moore (it might have been Noyce) and Ed Fredkin who talked about the simulation hypothesis. This was 1973. More importantly to me, one of the papers we read was from IBM about microprogramming, which grabbed me and caused me to work on it during graduate school. Even cooler, I sat with the authors during lunch at the first Microprogramming Workshop I attended.
Plus it was an easy A.

17

I remember when in my first stat course the professor derived the formulas that are in everyday use in the field. It was mind-blowing. You could work your way to formulas from first principles instead of them just being handed to you as a given? Amazing.

It was also fun when in physics the professor derived E=MC2 from F=MA, but we knew that wasn’t the way Einstein had done it.

18

I’ve kept one textbook from my college days - “PL/1 Structured Programming”. It was cool implementing things like hash tables and linked lists from first principles. If I could find a free PL/1 compiler for Windows or Linux I’d go back through the book and do the exercises.

19

Chemistry was a class I did poorly in during both high school and college. I had trouble with the math aspects, but was fascinated by the underlying concepts behind all the particles, orbitals, and molecular structure. To this day, though I am grateful I didn’t drop the class, as I feel it enhanced this layperson’s understanding (or perhaps appreciation would be a better term) of the universe.

20

I took the set of tests my college provided during the first week and was able to avoid the first semester of Calculus – I was able to go directly to the second. I think this was a Good Thing – I would’ve been bored going over material I’d already covered in my high school Calculus class. I thought I’d do the same for Physics – I aced every problem set and exam in my senior Physics course – but it turned out that they didn’t have a similar option in the Physics department.

So, of the options available (call them “Physics for Normal People”, “Physics for Pre-Meds”, “Physics for Poets”, and “Physics for Masochists”) I took Physics for Masochists – a very theoretical, math-based approach.

And quickly found out how stupid I was.

For the first time in my life I went to remedial help sessions, and learned how to think differently about physics. A life-changing experience. And I still think the problems and situations we covered were interesting and worthwhile.

I also took an elective seminar “Man in the Universe”, which delved heavily into Philosophy as well as Astronomy. Definitely an interesting class. We had the first session in a planetarium.