Students Get College Credit For Playing Guitar Hero?

april — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 23:35:56 +0000

The average four-year college education costs over 50 thousand dollars. Parents write out tuition checks assuming that their kids are being taught valuable knowledge and skills -skills taught by an experienced professor. So how would you feel if you found out that you were paying $1,078 per credit hour for your kid to play Guitar Hero?

New York University now offers a class called “Guitar Heroes: Music, Video Games and the Nature of Human Cognition.” While many students are excited about the class, many parents are upset by paying for something that their kid has most likely mastered outside of school in the first place. Have schools gotten lazier? Are there not enough underpaid adjunct professors willing to actually teach something that kids won’t learn on their own?

Offering trendy classes in college is

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not new. In the 70’s, students took college courses on Tarrot card reading and the Ouija Board. In the 80’s students studied slasher films for college credit and in the 90’s the trend started of taking classes that revolved around popular TV shows like Alley McBeal or Sex And The City. Take a pop culture subject, throw in “and the Nature of Human Cognition” in the title, and bam! You have a popular college class.

Are these pop culture classes worth paying for? That’s debatable.

Many people (including myself) think its kind of a cop out. Its time filler. What else can you throw in a four-year general education? I can just imagine the professors coming up with these classes. “I’ll teach a class that is timely, easy, and will make grading papers fun.”

In Kentucky, author and professor Ken Keffer really enjoys walking. He came up with the class “The Art of Walking” (which also happens to be the title of his book.) The course offers a mixture of lectures and walks around the Danville, Kentucky area including strolls with his dog through nature preserves, battlefields, cemeteries, the nearby Shaker Village, campuses and farms.

I’m not saying that college classes need to be boring and hard. But come on! Twitter and Facebook classes? Seriously? Maybe if you live under a rock. But for most of us, what a waste of money.

Last Year’s 12 Most Ridiculous College Classes

april — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 16:42:07 +0000

The Young American Foundation (www.yaf.org) has come out with it's list of "dirty dozen" college courses that the conservative foundation considers "the most bizarre and troubling instances of leftist activism supplanting traditional scholarship."

Personally, I just think these courses are a load of crap. They are created to delight the wacky, obsessed professors who teach them. Seriously, how bored do you have to be to spend money on this bull? Hey, it's cool to have an interest, but geez! Is this the Higher Education you want to pay for? Get yourself a library card people! Go see some indi movies, join a club, or just Google your political and sexual whims. Who needs a four-year degree for this stuff?

1. "The Phallus" — Occidental College. The course covers topics such as phallologocentrism, the lesbian phallus, the Latino phallus, "feminist and queer takings-on of the phallus," etc. Tuition at this school costs $32,800 per year.

2. "Queer Musicology" — UCLA. Explores the earth-shaking theory that the music of homosexual composers sounds different to homosexuals that it does to normal people.

3. "Taking Marx Seriously" — Amherst College. First line of the course description: "Should Marx be given another chance?" Marxist regimes have murdered over 100 million of their own citizens and enslaved hundreds of millions more.

4. "Adultery Novel" — University of Pennsylvania. Examines novels and films about adultery through Marxist, Freudian, and feminist lenses.

5. "Blackness" — Occidental College. Covers critical race theory and the idea of "post-blackness." But before you can take it, you have to pass a course on the sinfulness of "whiteness."

6. "Border Crossings, Borderlands: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Immigration" — University of Washington. I knew there must be a reason we don't defend our country from invasion: it would offend feminists. The course also uses race and gender B.S. to chip away at the War on Terror.

7. "Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism" — Mount Holyoke College. What is whiteness? An identity? An ideology? A racialized social system? Why waste time learning job skills when you could be finding out?

8. "Native American Feminisms" — University of Michigan. Examines the relationship between American Indian feminists and the struggle for land. Maybe they can recruit Ward Churchill to teach it.

9. "'Mail Order Brides?' Understanding the Philippines in Southeast Asian Context" — Johns Hopkins University. A history course cross-listed with anthropology, political science, and studies of women, gender, and sexuality.

10. "Cyberfeminism" — Cornell University. An art history course having to do with feminism, post-feminism, and the Internet.

11. "American Dreams/American Realities" — Duke University. Denounces Ronald Reagan's "shining city on a hill" as a myth.

12. "Nonviolent Responses to Terrorism" — Swarthmore College. Rather than offer constructive suggestions on how to deal with the menace of Muslim terrorism, this course "will deconstruct 'terrorism'" and "study the dynamics of cultural marginalization."

Other courses that could have easily made the list ("Dishonorable Mentions”) include UC-Berkeley's Sex Change City: Theorizing History in Genderqueer San Francisco; Cornell University's Sex, Rugs, Salt, & Coal; Hollins University's Drag: Theories of Transgenderism and Performance; and Hollins University's Lesbian Pulp Fiction.

College Is For Suckers » Waste-of-time classes

Students Get College Credit For Playing Guitar Hero?

Last Year’s 12 Most Ridiculous College Classes