College Is For Suckers » twitter class http://collegeisforsuckers.com The FIRST College Guide You Should Read Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:44:00 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Students Get College Credit For Playing Guitar Hero? http://collegeisforsuckers.com/2009/09/students-get-college-credit-for-playing-guitar-hero/ http://collegeisforsuckers.com/2009/09/students-get-college-credit-for-playing-guitar-hero/#comments Thu, 10 Sep 2009 23:35:56 +0000 april http://collegeisforsuckers.com/?p=290 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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Facebook For Dummies
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.

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