Wish BU offered a class on maple syrup? How about one on how to be happy, or the cultural implications of Sex and the City? Want your professor to take you on a field trip to a funeral home?
For college students looking for a diversion from the general tedium of required classes, colleges such as Alfred University, the University of California-Berkeley and Harvard University are spicing up their curriculums with classes that are out of the ordinary.
According to the school’s website, the Alfred University Honors Program offers more than 25 limited enrollment two-credit courses that do not fulfill any general education requirements. In fact, the website reads that the classes are taken with the intent of “adding ‘intellectual play’ to a student’s life.”
Robert Myers, professor of anthropology and public health at Alfred University, said his Fall 2005 course, “Nip, Tuck, Perm, Pierce, and Tattoo: Adventures With Embodied Culture” — a seminar on how culture influences people’s needs to make “improvements” to their bodies — was a “fun, serious discussion and serious examination of a huge aspect of the fascinating U.S. culture.”
“We not only went to the tattoo parlor where a couple had minor piercings done,” Myers said in an email, “but also to a funeral home and learned about the last modifications to the body.”
For Alfred University students with an appreciation for sweets, professor Laurie McFadden’s Spring 2006 honors seminar “Maple Syrup: The Real Thing” investigates “the history of maple syrup production,” according to the course website. Students get the chance to create — and more importantly eat — sweet confections and take field trips to local producers, restaurants and festivals.
McFadden, who is teaching the class for her second time, said the class filled up quickly with students in various majors.
For University of California-Berkeley students interested in taking the Democratic Education at Cal Program, they can create their own college course to teach. According to sophomore and DeCal instructor Connie Lee, the class “is a chance for students to share topics that are of interest to them to the campus.”
“Students develop a curriculum, a syllabus and a course reader for their respective courses,” Lee said in an email. “Their proposed courses are then approved by a sponsoring professor, the department chair and the Academic Senate.”
Lee, who instructs a DeCal class of 10 students, teaches “From Bombay Cinema to Bollywood,” a study of Hindi films from 1950 until the present. Lee said one of the goals of her course is for students to have a stronger understanding and admiration of the films during this era, addressing the influence of Indian politics, history, class culture and cultural value of the films.
And if classic Bollywood seems a bit foreign for students’ tastes, Nichole Gloudeman and Pilar Del Maria Gonzalez Morales said they decided to teach “Sex and the City and the Contemporary Woman” after discovering a mutual appreciation of the hit show.
On the first day of the popular class, Gloudeman and Gonzalez Morales had to narrow down the field of 120 students to 25 by asking the students questions related to the show, such as their favorite character and which character they identify with the most, Gloudeman said. Gonzalez Morales said their goal in the class is to “examine the show in a much more in-depth and critical manner than most discussions do in order to understand the roles of women and our own expectations for ourselves.”
Students see two episodes per class.
Tapping into college students’ appreciation of hookah, senior David Bluestone teaches another wildly popular DeCal class titled “The History of Hookah.” Bluestone said he teaches the Hookah class with his roommates, seniors Trevor Miller and Anthony Mendelson.
Bluestone said he wanted to teach the class to gain a better understanding how hookah affects health as well as educate other hookah smokers in an entertaining way.
“Ultimately, our goal for starting this class is that we have been smoking hookah since arriving at Cal and always wondered about the health effects and history behind what was becoming part of our daily life,” Bluestone said in an email.
Bluestone and his roommates organized a 12-week class that studies and explores the “biology of hookah as well as hookah in the arts and in the news,” Bluestone said.
The class offers lectures on the health risks of hookah and its history and modern use, Bluestone said.
He added that after class, he and his roommates invite their students to attend an optional “smoking section” at their house where they can “talk and practice smoking.”
With a mixed demographic that includes a large portion of Middle-Eastern students, Bluestone said he received more than 70 applications for the class, but he was only able to accommodate 30 spots.
Harvard professor Tal Ben-Shahar’s “Positive Psychology” course, with 865 enrolled students, is the university’s most popular class.
Ben-Shahar said that he came up with the idea for the course when he was an undergraduate student at Harvard, where he said that, although he was a good athlete and had a good social life, he was still unhappy.
“It was then that I realized that the internal matters more to one’s levels of wellbeing than the external, and it was then that I got into psychology,” Ben-Shahar said. “After studying psychology … I wanted to share what I have learned with others.”
According to the course website, the class focuses on “psychological aspects of a fulfilling and flourishing life,” with topics including “happiness, self-esteem, empathy, friendship, goal-setting, love, achievement, creativity, mindfulness, spirituality and humor.”
Self-help books offer quick solutions to problems but lack substance, Ben-Shahar said, and most people do not read writing and research from the academic world.
Considering the outstanding enrollment figures, Ben-Shahar said reaction to the class has been nothing but — well — positive.
“Students are attracted to this kind of class because they feel that it’s making a real difference in their lives,” he said.
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