As the title says, what was the most odd course you took in school? And by odd, I mean, something that’s in school that most people wouldn’t take (or you wish they had).
For me, it was Sports Officiating. In PE, I got sick and tired of the lottery system they had (I had gotten unlucky 2 times in the prior year- I could have picked golf, and that would have been fun), so instead I looked in the list for high school and picked this class. Most sports (especially professional sports) can’t start without a referee- so I picked this class. Basketball, Softball, Soccer and Flag Football, and it was both playing and enforcing the game rules. That was interesting twist for PE.
I took small engine repair in high school. It was fun, even if full of burn-out types. The teacher was cool. The hall pass was an old weedwacker we’d have to haul around if we needed to go take a piss. Then my very next class was honors physics where I learned very much the same stuff but was less fun and with snooty nerds.
Number Theory. Damn lot of fun! I skated to an easy A. But, wow, talk about your pure abstraction. Nothing in that class had anything to do with real life, nor have I ever had any use for anything I learned there.
Ah, but it was a grand waste of time! The teacher used to bet cookies. “Now, I’ll bet a cookie that this next number is prime.” On the last day of class, a student brought in a big plate of home-made cookies and paid off all the bets.
High school was pretty bland for me but I wish I’d taken the meat processing course I just couldn’t make time with all of the academic courses.
In college the most interesting was called engineering cultures and it was about how different cultures trained their engineers a day how that effected their greater society. I only remember a quarter of it any more but it does give me fun facts that come up in conversation every year.
I went to a small school, so there weren’t many oddball entries in the catalog. But the two most oddball, Latin and Typing, were the only courses I took in which I learned anything that would be of value in my later life.
Office Machines. Supposedly this would prepare us to work in an office environment (this was the pre-computer era). Learned how to work an old mimeograph, spent a month working on keypunch cards, cash registers, and - the only thing that came in handy - 10-key input. Years after high school, I tested for a job in a banking data entry dept; they made me a proof encoder because my 10-key input numbers were already above spec. I worked there 20 years, leaving as VP of Deposit Operations.
I took Fencing one semester for my PE requirement at Cornell. I also took Bowling and Ice Skating.
I didn’t actually take it, but I sat in on the Bee-Keeping course in the College of Agriculture. As an Aggie, I had to take one course each semester in the College of Agriculture. One semester I took Freehand Drawing in the Landscape Architecture Department.
I took a cult movie class at Kent State during my undergrad. Eraserhead, El Topo, Valley of the Dolls, Jim Jarmusch, Casablanca…
Sucked because it was only once a week and I had to miss like 2 of the 9 classes because of band performances. The professor did let me copy Eraserhead, though! (This was before it was on DVD)
Neither my HS nor my college had any options other than which track to take, but in the equivalent of Middle School we had “pretecnología”, which was a sort of “intro to the trades” intended to remind us that we could go to trade school; many of my former classmates, specially us women, credit it with being able to use power tools without our most personal bits falling off (some of the guys came from the kind of households where they’d call an electrician to change a lightbulb, so they too are very happy we had that class). The school also offered typing: the first year they offered it as an optional, but seeing how well it had gone it became required. I don’t type properly any more (computer keyboards tend to be too flat and too large for me), but I still type faster than most people.
As a senior in college, I took Bones, Bodies and Disease which was a dual advanced undergraduate/graduate class. It was taught by an expert on South American mummies that I still see featured in National Geographic and other places. The room was specially built for the class and hosted in hollowed out dorm rooms of all places. It wasn’t textbook theory either. The whole room was filled with thousands of real skeletal parts including skulls. Our job was to learn how to diagnose many different types of diseases, sex, age and everything else based on the clues in the bones.
The final exam consisted of us passing ancient skulls, femurs and everything else back and forth and describe in detail what happened to them. As a result of that class, I know more than any layperson should about trepanation (ancient brain surgery).
This was an American high school in California. The class was just called Canada, and was all about Canadian geography and history. I think the teacher was a former Canadian. At least I can name/identify the provinces, and know a lot about the War of 1812.
High School ca. 1965 (ancient, but not THAT ancient) - typesetting.
Real type trays, real type*.
We may or may not have set >1 line. We did ink them up and print what we had set.
This technology was almost completely replaced by the Linotype machine - ca 1880(?).
Some High Schools had real photo darkrooms - not that would have been cool.
I also ran a keypunch machine for Intro Programming. Real, live 5081 “IBM Cards”.
We didn’t get the modern keypunch-to-tape machines.
now being melted to form bullets - the lead/tin of the type is almost identical to that of bullets (“slugs”)
In high school there weren’t many oddball classes on offer. I took Typing, but that’s not especially odd.
In university (as a math major), I took Introductory Biblical Hebrew for fun. I also started taking a philosophy class called The Nature of Material Reality, but I dropped it when it turned out to be much less interesting than the title suggested.
My college career ended up having a lot more space for oddball elective courses than undergrads usually get, since I managed to skip freshman and sophomore-level Russian classes, and had the opportunity to study abroad in St. Petersburg for a year.
At St. Petersburg State University I took an elective course in Russian paleography - part of the course involved going to the National Library and examining documents written by Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great (comparison of handwriting systems over the centuries).
Back home at Georgetown, there were no more Russian language courses for me to take so I had a lot of slots to fill with electives. I ended up taking a semester of Basque, a semester of Old English, and a year of modern Greek. Lotsa fun.
