When I was in college my dad – the tuition-check writer – used to always say, “Don’t take any Mickey Mouse classes!” “I’m not paying for you to take Mickey Mouse classes!”
My senior year, I took The Art of Disney. I took it mostly as a bullshit way to earn some of those last few credits while simultaneoulsy yanking my dad’s chain, but it was actually very interesting. Did you know Disney was a racist? Who was into spanking?
I still have the textbook, a big glossy The Art of Disney coffee table book. (I wonder where that book is . . . . ) I got an “A,” natch.
I took a class on gender in 19th century religious utopian communities in the US. We focused largely on the Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida community. It was fascinating and hard as hell, but fairly useless.
Next quarter I’m taking Field Equipment Operation, aka “Tractor Driving”. I’m an animal science turned sociology major, and have no intentions of ever operating a farm of any kind. But I feel like I can’t be a real Aggie without being able to drive a tractor.
I took a course on the history and development of detective fiction. We read a lot of pulp novels and some newer stuff. Really neat class, but not the most useful thing I’ve ever studied.
Not university, but Cegep (post-secondary, pre-university general college in Québec) required some Phys. Ed courses, and I managed to get into Relaxation Techniques.
We were charged with the incredibly difficult task of NOT falling asleep while lying on the floor (on a mat) in a dark room, with our eyes closed, with relaxing music/nature sounds, right after lunch… for 2 hours.
Seriously, if we fell asleep, it affected our grade (though she’d let us sleep because apparently we needed it, and what’s the point of teaching relaxation techniques to sleep-deprived people?)
It was pretty fun, actually.
I took a computing class (also in Cegep) where it never got much more difficult than learning that “if you move the mouse to the right, the cursor on the screen moves to the right.” I didn’t get 100% in that course only because I didn’t bother doing all the stupid tedious online “tutorials” (which required the computer skills they taught in order to open them in the first place!)
And then there was Comparative Political Systems. You’d think that could be an interesting but tough class, huh? Comparing communism to democracy to… well, I don’t know what else, because we didn’t do any of that. On 3 lectures a week, the prof only ever showed up for 2, at most, and when he did he mostly talked about the weed he smoked and the beer he drank on the weekend. We had 3, short, open-book assignments (that includes the final!) and he took the average of best 2/3 as our grade!
I took a class on Folklore and Legends, which mostly revolved around tricks and tricksters. I wrote my final project on all those college urban legends. It was a blast.
I have a friend who got college credit for two semesters of bowling.
I know several people at a respected 4-year university who took a real, regular class called “Dinosaurs!” Yup, with the exclamation point right in the title, you know it’s going to be rigorous. From what I hear they watched Jurassic Park and played with toy dinos.
I took a fascinating sculpture course to fill in optional credits in my English degree. My sculpting skills were no better than average, but my essays were sharp enough to earn me an A.
Due to stupid credit requirements, limited class availability, and schedule conflicts, my last quarter in college I was forced to take “Peruvian Cultural Anthropology” to complete my Physics degree. :rolleyes: No offense to any Peruvaphiles that may enjoy that kind of class, but it just wasn’t my bag as a science major. It was especially tortuous because my professor was enthusiastically learning how to play that wooden flute thingy at the time, and subjected us to many horrid class interludes where he would play very badly to us. It felt like an “Andean Idol” audition.
Wish I had taken some of these classes. Some of they seem really cool.
My brother took a film class at UC Santa Barbara in the late '90s taught by John Carpenter. Class, apparently, consisted of watching old horror movies and then listening to Carpenter tell amusing anecdotes about Kurt Russell.
I’m taking a filler freshman-level seminar next quarter on the social history of Latin America. I just need the sweet sweet units to graduate.
Considering though that I’m getting a degree in the humanities though I guess one could make the argument that it is only but the tip of a useless iceberg.
Forgot to add: my most useless course that counted toward my major (Sociology) was “Collective Behavior”. I called it my Disasters Class; we learned about mass hysteria, human stampedes, heroism and cowardice, and how communities respond to natural disasters. It was awesome and I loved it.
In retrospect, this seems to be one of the biggest benefits of a college education: You can (theoretically) learn cool stuff from experts, and to hell whether it’s marketable or not. Hell, when I was 18, I didn’t know what interested me and what didn’t.
I had to take Intro to Fortran. I was an econ major and most of the students were either econ majors or bio majors. We learned that the prof was strung out on Valium which is how he lectured in a monotone at 8:30 in the morning on Monday Wednesday and Friday. That was completely useless and they later dropped the requirement.
I wanted to take Intro to Ancient Greek but the one year it was offered, it conflicted with something I needed to graduate.
I took Billiards. We learned about the different kinds of games, how to use English, trick shots, etc. And of course played pool most of the time.
I took “Folklore in the US”, which was kinda meh, but interesting. A lot of Snopesy-type stuff.
I took “Traditions and Culture” which was a class that basically taught the history of the University. Pretty interesting stuff, and I like history, but pretty useless as well.
I took “Physics of Sound” which was incredibly interesting, talking about sound waves and how they react to other stuff, how organ pipes and other instruments work, that sort of thing. Ultimately useless except for trivia, but I enjoyed it.
My whole transcript is full of these, because I love learning for learning’s sake.
My two favorite:
1989 and The Will to Power: Friedrich Nietzsche’s Final Year and Descent into Madness
The course covered one year in Friedrich Nietzsche’s life and is pretty much the reason I know tons of useless shit about Friedrich Nietzsche, like the fact that his Nazi sister would dress him, after syphilis devoured his brain, in long, flowing white robes and make people pay to come in and view him. That crazy bitch is one of the several reason he despised women.
Spanish 483: Homosexuality in the Caribbean and its Diaspora
Quite literally, the course was about not only homosexuality in the Caribbean, but rather about the experiences of people who were gay who had moved from the Caribbean to the U.S. and the resulting cultural phenomenon. One book we read was about a guy who grew up fucking goats and later died of AIDS (not from the goats), and the other actually was a comic book which included cartoon dildos dressed in fashionable clothing.
I can’t say the class was totally useless because it was in Spanish, so I learned something and it counted toward my concentration. Oh wait, no it didn’t because I think I ended up dropping it.
These courses are the reason I love college though. You can learn about flippin’ ANYTHING. Both classes contributed to my store of knowledge about the world. No class is truly useless. Except maybe WhyNot’s biology class.
Around 1980 I ostensibly attended Sheffield University (here in the UK) and obtained an honours degree in English Literature and Philosophy. Every minute, every class, every term of every year… all completely useless. And that’s plain, unvarnished useless without even the saving grace of inverted commas.
I was able to live a very easy life for three years, doing nothing of any benefit to me or anyone else, least of all the poor taxpayer who was funding all of this monumental waste of time. I didn’t think it made any sense at the time, and I don’t think it makes any sense now. I was quite sure, even at the time, that the money could have been put to a much better purpose. I don’t have a problem with courses being wholly or partly by taxation in which people learn practical and/or vocational skills that might be of use to society. But soft arts degrees, such as mine, are utterly useless and a scandalous waste of resources.
I took lots of unusual courses in undergrad that had nothing to do with my journalism major. In “Pompeii Archeology,” we studied slides of the city and discussed life before the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. “Theater Appreciation” addressed various aspects of the theater, from playwrights to scenery design to the importance of theater layout (and also led me to attend a fantastic student production of Cabaret). And in “Cultural Anthropology,” I got several hands-on lessons in how to identify the age, race and gender of human skeletons.
Of all of these courses, however, the easiest was a two-credit course called “Man’s Food.” I took it to avoid taking a college-level biology class. We spent an entire semester learning what foods were good for us and what foods were bad. One weekend we had to keep a diary of all the food we ate each day, complete with calorie counts. Another time we got 10 points toward our final grade for taking the Pepsi challenge.
It could have been incredibly boring, but the professor was funny and very entertaining. Plus it gave me a much-needed break from my honors courses.
By the spring of my last year in college I had pretty much wrapped up all the requirements, so my last semester was almost entirely “cool but irrelevant” classes:
[ul]
[li]Modern Science Fiction - read novels, watch movies, discuss same with other nerds - in other words, getting course credit for what I’d be doing anyway [/li][li]Decline of Empires - an Anthropology course which had the greatest final project ever: make up an imaginary empire and describe how it fell[/li][li]Change in Medieval Society - a discussion-based course with a grand total of two students[/li][li]Organic Chemistry II - not useless for a biologist, but not a requirement for my degree and nothing I’ve actually used - I only took it because it was fun. [/li][/ul]
The one real course was a graduate-level biological engineering course that I totally tanked in ('course, grade inflation means “tanked” = B-); the bio part was cake, but the engineering stuff was impossible. Haven’t used any of that info, either.
Then in grad school I took a totally irrelevant undergrad course in Animal Behavior and audited one on Scandinavian Sagas… useless information is pretty much my favorite hobby.
[/li][li]Decline of Empires - an Anthropology course which had the greatest final project ever: make up an imaginary empire and describe how it fell[/li][li]Change in Medieval Society - a discussion-based course with a grand total of two students[/li][li]Organic Chemistry II - not useless for a biologist, but not a requirement for my degree and nothing I’ve actually used - I only took it because it was fun. [/li][/ul]