I don’t feel so bad now for taking the courses I did. Probably the least useful to my Chemistry major was The Films of Ingmar Bergman-Formal and Freudian Approaches or as we liked to call it, How Depressed Can You Become in February in New England?
I also took bowling to fulfill a PE requirement, but it wasn’t even real bowling, it was candlepin bowling! (You know, real bowling requires effort.)
Finally, not the most useless course, but the most useless reason for taking a course was Weather. It was full of liberal arts majors fulfilling their science requirements, so I knew it would be easy. More important, though, was the fact that I had a broken leg and was on crutches my entire senior semester, and it met right after Biochem in the same room. Yes, I selected the course based on the fact that I wouldn’t have to move my fat rear.
I’ve taken several of the classes mentioned above, including Flower Arranging and Sociology of Deviance. I also took Karate (I had taken bowling in High School, and got that out of my system.
Easiest, though, was Agricuture Seminar - a class taught by the folks in the Agriculture Fraternity. Every week, you would get a 15 minute talk by one of the students about any topic in agriculture (I can still name most breeds of cows) and then you had to write a couple of lines about it.
As a physics major, I didn’t have a lot of time for fun classes, but I managed to squeeze in a few my senior year. My favorite was “Natural History of the Dinosaurs” which combined a somewhat rigorous analysis of the cladistics of dinosaurian evolution with the friggin awesomeness of dinosaurs.
Another interesting class I took was a physics class, sort of, but it was just a 2 credit discussion seminar. It was actually geared mostly toward philosophy majors, as it was a class on “The Quantum Enigma”. The class met once a week and we discussed the philosophical ramifications of the various interpretations of quantum mechanics. It was certainly a much different way of approaching physics than my previous classes.
I took a Songwriting seminar focusing primarily on Joni Mitchell. At the beginning of the semester, everyone brought in a favorite song for the class and we discussed it. When we went through the troubadours and the origin of the blues in the Mississippi Delta. A local jazz musician came in and played a set for the class and answered questions, a guy who designs albums covers came in and showed us how he did stuff on Photoshop, and the Alabama Blues Project brought Willie King into our classroom for a very intimate concert/Q&A session. Then we all went for a 3-day expedition at the local summer camp where everyone got drunk, played instruments, sang songs. There was Guitar Hero, I bodyslammed my professor’s child into a lake.
At the end of the semester, everybody paired off or joined a group or alone wrote songs and presented them to the class. I wrote an ode to Gregory the Hungry Caterpillar with my ex-girlfriend. All my classmates and I gathered together at the end of the semester and went to the old abandoned (and haunted!) mental institution. It was fucking awesome.
I took a freshman seminar called “The Films of Ingmar Bergman and the Classical Tradition.” Basically, it consisted of seven students watching a Bergman film every week, reading lots of Plato and and Aeschylus and Euripides, and writing response papers trying to connect the film and the reading. I don’t think they did connect, except in the professor’s head, but we got to sit around a seminar table watching black-and-white movies and feeling all intellectual, and I don’t think that’s a bad experience for college freshman to have.
Also, I learned how to use the reserve reading room, and how, if all else fails, you can write a paper relating almost anything to Shakespeare.
I occasionally see posts from the professor at InsideHigherEd.com. He was an interesting guy. I remember being really amazed that he knew Greek, Latin, AND Swedish, because it hadn’t occurred to my eighteen-year-old self that you could do that
“Psychology and Its Altered States.” That was in the early 80s. Can’t even begin to explain how much I enjoyed that class (and no, we weren’t taking drugs).
Prof (I don’t remember his name) had to be out of town for a couple class sessions for a seminar; he told us to show up and he’d have something for us to do. The first day there was a VCR, TV, and a video tape (I have a memory of it having an Alice in Wonderland type note saying “Play Me” but I could be imagining that). It was Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. We watched it over the two session, and everybody was completely absorbed, taking notes, and trying to glean what he wanted us to learn from the movie. After he came back, he picked up right where he’d left off before his absence. Part way through that class, someone finally asked what I assume we’d all been thinking: What did he want us to learn from Wonka? He said “Nothing. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted you to work and I thought you’d enjoy it.”
Advanced Organic Chemistry - the professor was a hoot, and I loved his Organic 1 and 2 classes.
World Religions - A 5-week summer class where we got to listen to Open-Minded Professor yell at Conservative Christian Boy
Piano for Non-majors (not totally useless, but I learned that being able to play saxophone doesn’t predestine you for piano greatness)
Useless as in necessary, but I don’t want to take:
My WHOLE SCHEDULE! (both Botany and Microbiology. Micro is actually going to be useful. I’m just bitter about having to come back for another semester.)
In order to fill out my graduation requirements (thus meaning it wasn’t entirely useless) I took a physics class designed for liberal arts types like myself. It was hysterical, because the instructor was a menacing and very athletic Israeli woman who whenever possible took her examples from her experiences in the Israeli military (machine gun kickback = “for every action there is an equal an opposite reaction”). She hurled a rubber ball into the classroom to demonstrate some other physical science concept and if it had hit anyone (it didn’t), “blunt force trauma” could have been our next lesson.
I think the rest of the class was terrified of her, but I thought she was both awesome and hilarious.
Parageography. AKA, the study of imaginary places. A wonderful class and one I keep trying to parlay into a game design job. The final project was to create (in no more than 5 pages, as I recall) an island complete with history, architecture, political system, etc.
Tastes and Pleasures. The study of food and entertainment in ancient Greece and Rome. Another really wonderful class! I learned what kind of wine people drank and that the classical inn did not, in general, have a big haunch of meat ready to carve off bits of to serve to passersby – moreover, if it did, you really didn’t want any… they’d cook the food you brought, though, and do a pretty good job of it. Not sure if this counts, though, as it went to my Classics minor. I’d count History of Astronomy too, but it goes to fulfilling my science requirement. However…
Hero with 1000 Faces. I took this class because the professor (who I’d had in Scandinavian Ballad Tradition, unarguably a more ‘useless’ class but one I treasure to this day for teaching me how to tell Finnish and Norwegian apart) was an absolute riot and loved me, always a fine combination. I wrote a final essay about the essential differences in the heroic archetype between Carrot Ironfoundersson and Samuel Vimes. Scoff if you will, but English degrees can be fun to get.
I took that too! And “Theater Appreciation 2”. Easy A, went to lots of shows, fun.
Also took “Popular Culture”. We watched a lot of movies and TV shows. Even better, this was a 300 level class, I think, so it counted as an upper-level humanities which I needed a few of for my Engineering degree. The “Theater Appreciation” class was a 100 level humanities, and I think I only had one slot for that.
We had a pretty tough schedule in our major, so I tried to keep the non-major classes as simple and/or interesting as possible.
Edit: Hey, they still have it, 10 years later, in the English department:
01:351:337 Popular Culture (3) Exploration of how popular forms like TV, movies, music video, rap, rock, comics, magazines, and advertising shape meaning and value in contemporary America.
I’m doing an arts degree, so everything I do is useless to varying degrees. For an introduction to film class last semester I did a final essay on *Arrested Development * and postmodernism. Which means that it was full of bullshit of course. But I loved having an excuse to sit around watching a sitcom while everyone else was slaving away at their work .
The History Of The Music Publishing Industry.
Yes, I learned about trends in music, but I also learned that parallels to the whole downloading jibber-jabber have existed all the way back to the sheet music industry days. Did you know that sheet music publishers tried to ban player pianos, and even music boxes, because some of them thought such Infernal Devices would destroy their trade? The BS never quits. :rolleyes:
I was a Computer Science major that had taken all his electives when I went over seas to study for a year. You have to take at least 15 credits and the selection in the program is very limited so I ended up taking Theatre. The prof seemed like your average laid back exhippy type, but when he started his class he saw it as his chance to perform and he was fantastic. For a subject I really didn’t care about at the time (and of which I’ve retained tons of information I still don’t really need) going to class was a blast. He was funny in a way that made you time your sips of pop so it didn’t come out your nose.
Natural Disasters class. It was a very interresting science class that I took to get my non-lab science out of the way, and it fit into my schedule. As things worked out, not only did I learn an absolute ton about how natural disasters (and semi-man-made ones) occur, I also got a kick out of the fact that my home town was in the college text (along with a disaster that I spent a summer helping work aid for).
Not really useless, but I took Films of the 40’s while in grad school for Electrical Engineering. We used to sit around and watch movies like Casablanca, The Best Years of Our Lives and To Have and Have Not. The professor was a terrific lecturer and really ignited a passion for cinema in me. I also took etching, lithography and watercolor painting art classes. It was quite refreshing to be surrounded with hot coeds which was quite a bit rarer in my graduate engineering classes. It was a bit of a struggle to get my faculty advisor to sign off on my course list, but i just bagged him when he went on sabbatical.
