I did very well in Physics and really enjoyed the lectures. We had a midterm and a final exam. Prior to the midterm, a student asked if we needed to memorize formulas or if they’d be provided. The professor said we’d be given everything we needed.
When the midterm exam came, someone immediately asked where the sheet with formulas was. The professor wrote F=ma on the blackboard and told the class any other formula we needed could be derived from that. People freaked out, but it was true.
During my first year I took “Human Biology: Sex Education.” The instructor was a funny guy. On the first day of class he told us we would be having no holds barred, exquisitely detailed discussions about all things sex, and would even watch explicit educational videos. All of which we did. The part that’s always stuck with me, from that first day, is when he went off about how this type of stuff should be taught in junior high and high school, but it will never happen because the American education system is… then he went to the board and wrote “FUCKED.”
It was a far cry from the sort of class I was used to in high school, that’s for sure.
The one that comes to mind as fun was a classical archaeology course that I took as a Humanities elective.
What made it really interesting is that the professor for that course was a literal world-class archaeologist, so a lot of what he was talking about was stuff he had actually done in the course of his career, not just regurgitating stuff from textbooks like lesser professors might.
The main one in business graduate school was a course in something like “The New Internet Economy”, that had been dreamed up in the heady days of 1995-2001, and we were taking it in the spring of 2003, after everything had settled out, and it turned out that it was a bubble, not a new economy. We raked that poor newly minted PhD over the coals in that class about why/how, and also the school’s administration about why we had to take this BS course. I always felt more like they should have had someone with a bit of snap rework it into “Why was it a bubble? Let’s use our business school knowledge to analyze the Dot-Com Crash of 2001-2002” instead of just teaching us the class that was obviously out of date and wrong a year later.
Do you remember who wrote it? I taught PL/1 one term, and I had to use the text our department chair had written. It was already out of date (1979) but our school had a Multics system, and Multics was written in PL/1 so it was kind of the native language.
Really? Those must be people who never think about the Holocaust at all. Or never think at all.
Probably my funnest undergraduate class was Medieval Italian literature. The first few meetings there were about 25 people but quickly everyone except me and about nine grad students disappeared. We read all of Dante and Boccaccio and a good bit of Petrarch and Orlando Furioso by Ariosto, at least that what I remember. We all sat around a table and talked our heads off. Sometimes the professor would start reading Dante in the original medieval Italian and although I couldn’t understand a word I was entranced. The professor told me privately that if I wanted a reference for grad school he would be happy to oblige. I had no intention of grad school but it was certainly flattering.
I loved my Astronomy course in college. It was taught by Professor Arthur Davidsen who was instrumental in bringing the Space Telescope Science Institute to Johns Hopkins. His enthusiasm rubbed off on a lot of us in the class. We learned some basic rocket science (requiring calculus) along with the history of astronomy, stellar evolution, etc.
Back in the late 70’s Hopkins had an actual observatory on campus in the middle of Baltimore dating back to the early 20th century. He took us out to use it and that’s when I first observed the Galilean moons of Jupiter, and later the rings of Saturn and I was blown away.
He built a number of ultraviolet telescopes, one of which went up on the space shuttle, and earned some major Astronomy awards and international renown, but sadly died young at the age of 57.
That sounds like a good one!
One of my other favorites was 1990s surrealist South American literature, specifically focused on the recent fascist movements in Argentina and Chile. There was this beautiful book we read called La Ciudad Ausente (The Absent City.) From what I remember it was about a journalist’s experience with the government trying to shut down a machine that was spitting out people’s memories of “the disappeared.” The theme was collective trauma and how it can’t be suppressed.
Loved that book. My major was Spanish, which entailed reading a great deal of Spanish literature, usually related to historical events. I wrote one of my final papers on the impact of NAFTA on the Mexican economy. But we were watching things like Amores Perros and reading El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman.) Really compelling stuff. I love surrealism in general.
Which reminds me I did a Spanish presentation on Dali and the surrealist art movement during the Spanish Civil War.
I’ll never forget that one because I got an A but I had issues with that professor and I complained to my husband that I didn’t know how she felt about my presentation. He said, “What exactly did you expect? A single tear to roll down her face?” Haha yeah I guess I did.
There was this one Spanish prof who taught all these amazing courses and I signed up for basically every one. I had a major crush on him. He was British. I took one of his courses with my husband when we were dating, and then a couple years later I turned up in another class with my husband’s last name. He got a bit of a kick out of that.
It’s so weird because I was so profoundly depressed in college I could barely function, but the sheer number of cool things I could learn about kept my soul alive. It was simultaneously the worst and best time.
I’ve got a few.
In Introduction to Philosophy, a dude sat down next to me and as time passed it became apparent he was either off his medication or high. He couldn’t stop fidgeting and kept asking bizarre questions that had nothing to do with the discussion. The professor finally ejected him from class and aftward a few of my peers felt sorry for me. I wasn’t afraid he’d get violent or anything, it was just weird.
I had a course on Christian Eschatology, and the professor made us all come up with our own apocalyptic timeline. When I received my timeline back from the professor, she wrote, “I’m my twenty years of teaching this course, I’ve never had a student put themselves on the timeline before.”
In one of my upper level undergraduate history courses, we would read a different article each week and discuss it in class. One week we read an article with poor citations and conclusions the author failed to support and the professor fessed up. Every year he deliberately assigns a bad article to demonstrate that just because something is published doesn’t mean it’s any good. Which prompted a conversation about writing history with this exchange.
Student: So does that mean history is just a bunch of bullshit?
Professor: Yes, but it’s well constructed bullshit.
Genetics was a really interesting class for me because it uses accessible areas of several different disciplines to present some truly fascinating ideas, some of which are relevant to everyday life, and some to the question of life itself. If you know basic probability math, I’d highly recommend taking genetics.
I loved math the most, and my Probability and Statistics class was a favorite. Cost Accounting was also good.
I had a class in building an operating system. We used LISP which was a huge change in thinking and to this day one of my favorite programming languages. One that became memorable much later was a speech class took over the summer to fill an elective. In California you used to (still do?) need to have a speech course. A lot of potential teachers got to that point and were scrambling to take a speech class (before the time of online classes no less) and there I am with my transcripts showing SPCH105. 
The 3 courses I had taught by Dr. Black (Europe: Renaissance - Present, Tudor & Stuart England, and the required “Writing In Your Field” class) were the reason I piloted (and then taught for 20 years) AP European History at my school. That and the fact that his wife was very involved in the AP program and got me access to all sorts of stuff.
I just said to me wife, “Let me read you a paragraph that shows why I read SDMB.”
I just found this by googling; I haven’t used it myself, but it seems to be what you want.
http://www.iron-spring.com/
My university had a professor who was an expert on the JFK assassination. It was not his primary field of expertise but a side-gig and, apparently, he was well known and well regarded in those circles that dived deep into that topic (and not fringy stuff…published, peer reviewed research).
So, he got the university to offer an elective course on the JFK assassination.
There were many choices for elective courses that were “easy” (read: low effort). This one was not easy inasmuch as it required students to read and study and write papers. Nevertheless, it was, by far, one of the most popular courses at the university for an elective. It was a hard class to get in to because it was so popular. It was 100% filled every semester.
It was surprisingly fascinating.
Note: It was not loony conspiracy stuff although loony conspiracy stuff was covered.
I did love European history as well. As a senior in high school I took the AP class and our instructor was the toughest teacher in the place. His tests lasted two days. But everyone who took the AP test at the end of the semester passed it, and we discovered that Mr. Wingo’s test format had been what the AP test used. So glad I had him.
I took a 200 level physics class my sophomore year at UW-Madison (the level that required having taken calculus) and it mostly kicked my ass and I shouldn’t have taken it because as a Comp Sci major it wasn’t a prereq for anything, but one random day the prof threw away whatever the regularly scheduled lecture was and talked about how Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 was going to crash into Jupiter the coming summer and it was awesome. He put something in the final about the comet too, but not a hard question, I forget what it was.
A few semesters later I took History of Science that was done in the same lecture hall and one of the best classes I took.
2 stand out:
1.)
Managerial Accounting at 8.00am (Illinois, winter - so basically in complete darkness) … the prof. was so enthusiastic, one might have guessed she discovered General Relativity over the weekend… it did rub off a bit (given the dryness of the material) … but I always have that as a moment when a great prof. did make a difference
2.)
History/Economy (Austria) … It was there, where I - for the first time in my life - understood that it is/was all a contiuum … before that history in HS was always - the romans, the greek, the maya, the vikings or so … closed, isolated chapters like in a sitcom …
Here in history they basically started out around Jesus and worked their way up, with lots of historic aspects of history, e.g. how the rise of the cities was both a precursor and a consequence of deminishing the atomized feudal system.
One wrinkle of that - I recall quite vividly - was about the french revolution, and one often forgotten side-aspect of beheading royals was that it established the fact that there is no such thing as “king by devine authority” as there was no plague and no other divine consequences imposed by Mr. God when “his” king was killed by peasants.
This rocked the whole believe-system that people were put in their place in society by god and this order was not to be changed, as it was god’s will. People then started questioning the status quo and developed a desire to move up. That was basically the beginning of the end for monarchy as we knew it - and the beginning of the industrial revolution (one aspect was new machinery, but the other was that we could progress and do things differently b/c there was no divine-mold anymore) and is quite possibly one of the most important moments in history.
fascinating, indeed that 30+ years later I still get pumped on that kind of memory.
Where did you go to school? I went to MIT, which used Multics, and was the only place I encountered it. I thought it must hsvde been MIT’s own system.