Posted on 06/08/2013 8:48:59 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
LOL!
Invented languages is fascinating. Why should something so central to humanity be left to chance and idiots (see addition of “assault weapons” to English)? Esperanto was an honest attempt. Klingon is surprisingly well done. Tolkien spent much time creating Elvish etc. with good results. A fine endeavor requiring deep understanding; why not have a course in it?
Most of those don’t sound bad. Taking an occasional fun course is good for one’s education.
here’s a useful class:
University gun class to focus on safety and training
http://www.bsudailynews.com/Content/News/News/Article/University-gun-class-focuses-on-safety-and-training/1/15/39181
I thought people used to go to “The Learning Annex” to take such courses.
The military academies are still great, even if PC is creeping in. My oldest didn’t want the full immersi8om, so he opted for AF ROTC. He hasn’t cost me anything since his freshman year, and even that was pretty cheap after scholarships.
I know better than to type without my reading glasses on, but I still do it anyway.
Many of these courses strike me as legitimate, if not for the [intentionally] catchy titles. As an English graduate who dabbled a little bit in linguistics, we were briefly taught something like #6 - though it was a little early for Klingon, we looked at Esperanto and another science-fiction language, Laadan.
Give some of these courses less provocative names - “Historical Revisionism,” “Artificial Languages,” “The Portrayal of Science in Popular Entertainment,” or “Critical Thinking and the Media,” to name a few, and they would pass with hardly a glance from those crusaders who believe most of what post-secondary students are being taught is junk. (Not that I would disagree with the crusaders on every point.)
Sometimes the title is a hook to draw in students who just need a distribution requirement. "Far Side Entomology" may just use cartoons as a gimmick to attract attention from students who don't particularly care about bugs.
Or the classes are freshman writing seminars that use clothes or cross-dressing as themes to get students writing. I'm not saying it's a good idea or a worthwhile use of one's time, but it's not quite as crazy as it might at first appear. Sadly, a lot of freshmen are more interested in clothes closets and Lady Gaga than in Medieval poetry.
Belmont, a Christian university, actually put the bit about the chicken/distraction course on one of their web pages. People who come to their site scratching their heads about the crazy course, might just find other things more to their liking on the site or at the college.
Gary Larson had taken several entomology courses and all of his “bugs” are easily identifiable. If you know the names of the insects, and their life cycles, then the cartoons are real funny.
My favorite one involved a bar scene and a male hitting on a female with the immortal line that he had 3 days to do this and then he was going to die. Well that is true for the Ephemoroptera, they emerge as adults and have a scant 3 days to mate, produce a clutch of eggs and then they die. So to us entomologists, that's real funny.
I can also do open heart surgery on cockroaches, but require payment in advance with no refunds.
Actually, entomology might not be a bad course. I took introductory entomology in college and it was one of the most interesting courses I ever took. I can still look at a ‘bug’ and sort of figure out if it is a coleoptera or a hymenoptera and certainly can figure out if it is an anarachnid.
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