Which Classes are Important?

[fabrisse]

I liked having to take Core classes in College. It was a great way to learn something new that I would never have considered taking if the requirements hadn't been there. I loved Criminology, and I think it's helped me dealing with "returning citizens" in my current job. Philosophy is important even if I found it dull at the time (not a great teacher).

My "I think everyone should take this" class is Art History. It was more helpful for art I didn't like. Having a framework in which to judge, understanding the aim of a movement or artist, and getting a cultural perspective on the crafts used helped to shift my perspective. I'm never going to be a huge fan of most pop art, but knowing why it happened as a movement is helpful in wider contexts.

It's also helped to accommodate shifts in my taste. By looking through informed eyes, I've come to deeply appreciate surrealists and other early 20th century art movements. I'm still not fond of cubism, but I can recognize that "Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2" (Duchamp) is a seminal work of the 20th century.

Since moving back to DC, I've begun going to the Hirshhorn. Again, most of the pieces in it -- Rodin excepted -- are not to my personal taste. On the other hand, I've found myself moved by pieces I would never have been exposed to. It's always more miss than hit for me, but the experience is still rewarding.

Back when Dad was advising 500+ students a semester, there came a day where I needed to cover the front desk for my department (which was at that time in the same building). The secretary was part-time and had left for the day, but as a package was expected, I had to be downstairs on one of Dad's advising days.

Steve was a friendly student who was complaining about Professor Dad trying to convince him to use his electives for something other than Political Science. Steve wanted to be a diplomat and was majoring in International Relations. He didn't even like having to take his English and Math requirements. If he could, his entire schedule would have been IR, Poli Sci, History, and, perhaps, a Foreign Language. It was ridiculous, he said, that Professor Dad wanted him to take Art History or Music Appreciation or a World Literature Class.

I asked him one question: "If you're at an embassy dinner and seated, as many junior diplomats are, between the wives of two cultural attaches from foreign countries, what will you talk about?"

The pause yawned widely.

I pointed out that part of diplomacy was the ability to speak intelligently on a wide range of topics to people who might not be of any direct use or importance, but whose tangential importance couldn't be overstated.

We spent the next twenty minutes ripping apart his class schedule and adding in his new electives. We changed his History requirement from U.S. History to, I think, a survey of World History (could have been European history). He took Art History covering Pre-History to about 400 A.D. (and took the 400 A.D. to Modern Art the following semester). He added a Music appreciation course in Classical Music, too.

After his appointment, Professor Dad formally made me Steve's advisor, and I remained so through the next 2.5 years until he graduated. Every time I saw Steve, he was raving about something new he'd learned. I think he's probably a pretty good diplomat, now.

So. I want to know if there's a class those on my friends' list thinks everyone should take.

Comments

[tediousandbrief.livejournal.com]

That is a good idea and was excellent advice to him! I never took any classes in art or art history. My core requirement for that area, I think, was Jazz history...which mostly taught me that I can't stand jazz outside of certain older eras.

I tend to favor history classes and think that most people should have to take way more history than is normally required. A good, comprehensive World War II class is a must, plus then a few world/non-US history classes.

I did take an English class called The Movies in college as an elective. We watched movies once a week, but the class part of it delved a bit more into the staging of films (use of colors, camera angles, cuts, history, etc.) It included documentaries, shorts, silents, and foreign films. It was a great class so that you didn't just watch movies for entertainment so much as for being able to look beyond the basic film on the screen and think more about the production and visual aspects.

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

I don't know if you've seen Kingsman: The Secret Service, but someone pointed out to me that right after Harry says something about the aristocracy having "weak chins" it cuts directly to the very firm chin of Eggsy our other protagonist (deutagonist, is technically the term, I believe.). I loved that. I also adored my "films of the forties" class.

Yes, more people should know history and please, someone, anyone, teach Americans geography. But for me, it's the art, music, and literature (including film and theater) classes which will give students the most bang for their buck in terms of inspiration.

[tediousandbrief.livejournal.com]

Basic world and American geography would be awesome.

Also a class on current events. We had something like that in high school where we read Newsweek and what was happening in the world. I remember it was when there was the Japanese Embassy Hostage Crisis in Lima.

We are getting towards that anniversary, but I was shocked and dismayed by the number of my fellow classmates in college acted like they had no idea why the events of 9/11 happened.

I was a college senior at the time and the second I heard about the attacks knew who had done them. (Literally I was told that planes had hit the buildings and the buildings had fallen and I shocked my friend by saying "Bin Laden".) The rest of my friends seemed to not even remember things like the USS Cole or the bombings in Africa or Saudi Arabia just a few years beforehand.

Sorry, got a bit off topic. Granted, that next semester there was a fight to get into the one Middle Eastern history class offered at the university.

[serafina20.livejournal.com]

Some kind of mythology/folklore/the Bible as Literature (do they have the Quran as Literature?) Knowing the stories behind the stories is important.

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

Definitely. Comparative religions and/or mythologies is helpful for understanding cultures and cultural conflicts.

[siderea]

I don't like requiring classes, but I will tell anyone who asks this: I think everyone should have a pragmatic class in computer programming. Ideally a year-long course that takes you from "this is a variable" through building a simple SQL-db-backed website.

This is our world now. Going through that process revolutionizes how one experiences the digital world. Not just in the sense of demystifying the mysterious, but giving one an idea of what is reasonable and what is unreasonable to expect of computer systems, what is hard and what is not hard, what is policy and what is possibility: all the things one needs to know to be able to reason cogently about the issues of culture, law, public policy, etc that are before us more and more.

A couple weeks ago, all of the bills my second clinic sends to a certain insurer bounced off their online gateway. It was a batch job, and one of the clinicians had edited a client record to add some spaces to a client's name. Our VP spent hours trying to debug why our batch job failed.

I went in and talked to her about it. She had no idea whether this was a reasonable way for computer systems to work. She'd never used chomp to remove whitespace from user submissions. She'd never had to use try/catch blocks for user errors. She'd never written user input validation code. So she thought maybe this is all fine? This is just how computers are, you know, persnicketty.