Your Favorite Classes?

Professor Snugglesworth

I just started my first semester in Criminal Justice, and I'm having a blast with the classes so far. A particular favorite is Studying Violence, which deals with all the juicy stuff like terrorist attacks, serial killers, domestic violence....basically stuff that you won't be falling asleep over.

So how about naming some kickass classes that you've attended?

One of my personal favorites was Horror Class. Yes, such a class exists, for anyone choosing to major in film (which I decided in for a semester, but soon quit on).

You attended classes in an auditorium, with a different movie to watch each week. For B-movie topics, there was Basket Case. For artsy horror, there's George Romero's Martin. Classic horror was Halloween and Chainsaw Massacre. Role reversals, we watched I Spit on your Grave (all the girls left during the rape scene).

And for the final? Dead Alive. The whole class just erupted in laughter. Good times.

Sentry

I took a Domestic Violence class that taught me so much. For our final project we got to look at a real case involving a domestic killing and determine how different agencies failed the victim and what could have been done differently.

Loren Michael

Political Violence was my favorite class, but not the most formative or interesting that I have ever taken.

We talked about violence as it applies to politics. Coups (frequently not so violent), terrorism, whatever.

Sentry

I'm beginning to sense a theme...

Shazkar Shadowstorm

Man, I just posted this:

next fall, pretty much i am taking discrete math + my senior applied math seminar... and then need other classes to stay a full time student cuz those first 2 should be enough for me to basically be done with school

so i am looking for 2 interesting seeming classes that are at the same time not difficult, one of which i may or may not take pass fail...

some possible options:
spanish, just so i remember everything i learned in HS and it doesn't go to waste
logic of collective thought in poli sci department
some random phil class, like Darwin since its taught by Philip Kitcher
a random history class, like Eric Foner's one on emancipation & reconstruction era america
an easy freshman level psychology class which could be interesting
maybe some kind of... literature class or some shit? where i read books or something?

thoughts? hopes? dreams?

in chat for opinions, not 10 minutes ago.

I haven't taken any wildly interesting courses, most of my courses have been classes for my major or econ or CS classes... so now that I have time as a senior who finished most of his requirements, I need something interesting to take, but I have no idea.

Maybe this thread will give me ideas.

Burtletoy

Bio Capstone. Evolutionary Analysis by Freeman and Herron. Amazing class capped off by the most amazing text book I've ever read. Loved every page.

Element Brian

Last semester was my first of college, I had Math 108, Humanities on Propoganda, the basic Science requirement class, Spanish 302 and a Religion class which you don't care about because..its PA.

Really nothing too interesting, but spanish was fun since my proffessor was pretty funny and the class was small enough that he knew us pretty well and could poke fun at us..

Next semester i have similar classes including a Weight Lifting class and a Guitar Class.

I'm hoping that the guitar class will be my favorite, if not.....then crap.

Beren39

Forensic genetics and forensic entymology. Basically any of the supplementary forensic courses I took for my bio degree. It's something I've always been extremely interested in and these courses spared no anatomical detail. Talk about horror movies, you should have seen some of the pictures.

Bursar

In my freshman year, I took an intro to Psychology as an elective. It was a really quite interesting, because most of it was the physical stuff: "This area here controls long-term memory, and here's how we know that..." followed by the horrible grisly story of how some poor guy had a railroad spike shot into his head that obliterated that part of his brain. It went on like that for pretty much every area of the brain.

That, and videos about confusing babies. "We can tell they're experiencing a cognitive dissonance because they start crying." Heh heh.

Hachface

Paladin.

Mike Danger

Hachface wrote: »

Paladin.

*golf clap*

Railroad spike guy was Phineas Gage.

My best class from first semester (I just started college this year) was Nazi Germany: Rise and Fall, followed closely by Personal Values (basic philosophy). My best class from this semester so far has been Introduction to Statistical Analysis (although that's not saying much, as they've been pretty crappy this time around).

Hachface

As part of the honors program at my school, I had a two-semester long seminar on evolution and ethics.
It was pretty fascinating.

Variable

I took Ethics one year, not particularly unique as far as content but we got to talk a lot which was great. I just talked all class long and got a good grade. it was like a thread from here.

other then that... sadly nothing really stands out. I have enjoyed other classes, most of my classes actually, but nothing was specifically great.

Hachface

Freshman year my Philosophy 101 teacher walked us through an interpretation of Plato's Dvided Line diagram that blew my fucking mind.

I don't remember what about it made such an impression, and I'm pretty sure the professor was actually misinterpreting what Plato was saying, but damn it made me want to switch majors.

And I really should have.

Tarantio

Musical Improvisation. That class was fun as all hell.

Vincent Grayson

My Biomedical Ethics class I took a few years back was probably my favorite of the classes I've taken. One of the professors was formerly the head of the President's Council on Ethics, so he had a lot of cool experiences to bring up.

Squirrelmob

I'm in a class about linguistics in Tolkien's works.

It's in my university's Residential College for Arts and Humanities, so we birdwalk a lot, and the prof is kinda a space case, but the best kind. It's a small class, and pretty much everyone in it is pretty cool, which leads to fairly candid discussion.

Dark Moon

Comparative Chordate Zoology. The first half of the course was more focussed on anatomy and physiology and had a whole bunch of dissections in the lab portion (various simple chordates, hagfish, turtle, dogfish shark, kitty) that were fascinating. The latter half has been focussed entirely on mammals, and has involved a bunch of interesting field work including an animal behavior study of our own concoction and experience using and tracking radio collars integrated with GPS. The current class is nice and small (40 students, pared down from 120ish) and the labs are only 8-10 people each. Both professors that were involved in teaching the course were wonderful.

Speed Racer

Psych 101 last semester was interesting enough to make me switch majors.

Univariate Statistics suuuuuuuucks though.

Bursar wrote: »

In my freshman year, I took an intro to Psychology as an elective. It was a really quite interesting, because most of it was the physical stuff: "This area here controls long-term memory, and here's how we know that..." followed by the horrible grisly story of how some poor guy had a railroad spike shot into his head that obliterated that part of his brain. It went on like that for pretty much every area of the brain.

That, and videos about confusing babies. "We can tell they're experiencing a cognitive dissonance because they start crying." Heh heh.

Oh man confusing babies is the best thing.

Raiden333

Intermediate Logic last year, and my current class of Nonclassical Logics, are two of the most brain-opening things I've ever done.

Godfather

My History of Animation class was amazing, mainly because I got to see films and projects that 95% of the world didn't even knew existed, and were fucking phenomenal.

Plus the very last class covered the Disney renaissance period, which was outstanding. Did you know that The Lion King was made by one of Disney's B-grade studios, and they had very little expectations for it? I didnt!

Variable

I would take a class like that in a second.

Tarranon

My micro-econ class was the first one in quite some time that had me staying after class had ended to pick the professor's head. Also the first time I kept a book from a class for future reference.

CygnusZ

International Patent Law

Speed Racer

CygnusZ wrote: »

International Patent Law

For a second I thought this said "International Planet Law" and got excited.

Rhesus Positive

My Beowulf class this year is pretty awesome; the class is pretty small, which means that everybody has a chance to discuss stuff, and out lecturer is an awesome guy who is willing to tolerate a certain amount of crazy theories as long as it's evident we're basing them on the text. I've described Unferth as a parallel of the Janitor from Scrubs before, for example.

My Textual Criticism class is also really interesting, as it covers stuff that you don't tend to think of until you do it in a class; it's also taught by the Beowulf guy.

Morninglord

My Social Psychology lectures this year are what I've wanted to do since I started doing my course. I was all expecting it last year but it was only a little bit in a combined course.

This time it's all semester mwuahahahah.

I also like the Personality and Intelligence course but mainly that's because the lecturer is my hero.

Although it is still neat. Most especially because there is zero freud. Woo! Did all those crackpots last year.

Squirrelmob wrote: »

I'm in a class about linguistics in Tolkien's works.

It's in my university's Residential College for Arts and Humanities, so we birdwalk a lot, and the prof is kinda a space case, but the best kind. It's a small class, and pretty much everyone in it is pretty cool, which leads to fairly candid discussion.

I have the super huge extended LOTR with a bunch of his backnotes and stuff and I found the parts about linguistics more interesting than the story itself. :P

YamiNoSenshi

I took a rather intense Sci-Fi lit course over the summer one year. It was like a book a week, but they were mostly books I had already read (Dune, Neuromancer, War of the World). The only problem was that the professor was a like a 6 on the ten point scale between misanthropist and feminazi, so it sometimes bled over. I learned to tune it out.

My web design course was pretty awesome, but that was more the professor than anything else. Same for the poetry classes. I may be a CS grad, but I loves me some well presented written works.

L|ama

Chemistry because I make stuff go from pretty colours to other pretty colours.

And our lectureres enjoy blowing up hydrogen balloons (one of them by first lighting his hand on fire, and then using that to ignite the balloon).

Local H Jay

journalism is extremely fun and rewarding
graphic design taught me awesome programs like photoshop, flash, and indesign
psychology in literature for the bits on autism
civics: debates ftw

Mazzyx

This is hard. I have to say my Japanese class was one of my all time favorites in under-grad. Had a great set of teachers and cool people in the class. Actually learned the language, too.

Some other classes I loved included my Philosophy 101, which the professor basically stated that we were actually just doing an ethics class since most of needed to learn that more than just general philosophy. Great teacher, too. Looked, acted and sounded like George Carlin. Also took an Asian religions class from a tall, heavy set, Boston Irish who was a devout Buddhist and we would have class canceled because he wanted to sit in the nice weather and watch clouds or something.

History wise has to go to my 1600-Present Japan class but it was also my major area of study. Second to that though was a course on the Crusades that was highly in-depth and heavy on reading translations of period text. It was fascinating. I remember the first paper was to take the three major descriptions of Pope Urban's speech and describe why each was different. But if I didn't study Japanese history I would be studying Crusade history.

Actually re-read books from both classes recently.

Teslan26

Fundamental Mathematics.

SatanIsMyMotor

Outside of English Lit classes which I love just due to the far out thinking you get to do I think one of the most "game changing" classes I ever took was on restorative justice.

The subject matter was a complete paradigm shift in terms of how I looked at the justice system and sincerely altered my outlook on life in general.

ViolentChemistry

Criminology was fun, 600-level Aesthetic Theory taught by a jazz musician was excellent, anything involving production has been fun too.

fairweather

I had an electronics course during college, Microprocessor I think it was. We learned about microprocessors and how to hook them up in circuits and whatnot. I'm not terribly good with electronics (was a CS major), but I had a blast. We had to write assembly programs and translate them to hex codes by hand then input them manually using a keypad. Later on we moved on to setups where we could just send the code from a lab computer to the memory.

Hooking up an LED and getting it to blink periodically using my own program was just a lot of fun.

Other than that I really enjoyed my senior year CS classes. In one of them we got to implement a compiler for a programming language our teacher made up. Actually seeing how everything for a running program gets structured in memory was really neat. I also had to write a paper comparing a couple programming languages. That's probably the only paper in college I actually enjoyed writing. I went waaaay over the required length (turns out I had the option of covering only some of the topics for the paper, but I covered all of them).

Funny thing is though, I think it was 3 punctuation errors in that paper that resulted in me getting just below a 3.0 gpa.... I'm so glad to be out of school now

Richy

I had a blast teaching Operating Systems this term. It's a really hands-on topic; all the theory is derived from actual applied systems, so you get a real feel of how it works. And for the labs I got to (teach how to) build part of an operating system.

As for classes I took, I guess my favourite would be the Natural Language Processing course I took at UofT a few years ago. Yet another very applied topic: you'd learn something, then see how it applied on a real word/sentence/text/language. I had no idea language was so... mathematical!

fairweather

Oh yeah, we also had a class where everyone wrote an 8086 simulator over the course of the semester.

The best moment was when I was sitting in the lab and was able to run the test program that played the James Bond theme. I ran it one time, but the sound came out very slowly. I finally figured out that it was one of my windows for displaying stats that was bogging down the system, so once that was closed everything ran quickly.

There was also our Assembly language class where we had to write Pong for the final project. My version got put into the pong hall of fame along with one of the other projects. The thing that made mine stand out was that you could actually move both paddles at the same time! Well, I think it was that feature plus the fact that mine had a large, fairly rounded ball instead of using an ascii character or just a block. Most of the projects seemed to read input in a way that wouldn't detect when more than one key was pressed, so one player could hold down their key and keep the opponent from moving their paddle. I read the status of the modifier keys on the keyboard (shift, ctrl, alt) using one operation in order to move both paddles simultaneously.

The timing for it wasn't based on a clock though so the game would run faster on faster computers. I could actually play both sides at the same time even on the faster machines, but my teacher thought it was too fast

We also had a unix class where everyone wrote a mail server of some sort (POP3 I think, don't quite remember). Then for one lab we had "Server Wars" where we had to attempt to crash each others' servers. I think the only bug that killed most of them was that some people weren't properly handling the end of file, so all anyone had to do was just telnet to the server and hit Ctrl-D to kill it.

Mike Danger

fairweather wrote: »

We also had a unix class where everyone wrote a mail server of some sort (POP3 I think, don't quite remember). Then for one lab we had "Server Wars" where we had to attempt to crash each others' servers. I think the only bug that killed most of them was that some people weren't properly handling the end of file, so all anyone had to do was just telnet to the server and hit Ctrl-D to kill it.

I would take a class like this in a heartbeat.

Squirrelmob

Morninglord wrote: »

Squirrelmob wrote: »

I'm in a class about linguistics in Tolkien's works.

It's in my university's Residential College for Arts and Humanities, so we birdwalk a lot, and the prof is kinda a space case, but the best kind. It's a small class, and pretty much everyone in it is pretty cool, which leads to fairly candid discussion.

I have the super huge extended LOTR with a bunch of his backnotes and stuff and I found the parts about linguistics more interesting than the story itself. :P

Yeah, the appendices (appendixes? gall bladders?) have so much extra information in them. Along with the Silmarillion, the appendices are the second most used thing in the class.

Just last week we had a guest speaker who is a co-editor/co-founder of the Tolkien Studies journal. Any obscure class where you can get one of the leaders in the field to just show up and talk is pretty amazing.

Nerissa

Richy wrote: »

I had a blast teaching Operating Systems this term. It's a really hands-on topic; all the theory is derived from actual applied systems, so you get a real feel of how it works. And for the labs I got to (teach how to) build part of an operating system.

As for classes I took, I guess my favourite would be the Natural Language Processing course I took at UofT a few years ago. Yet another very applied topic: you'd learn something, then see how it applied on a real word/sentence/text/language. I had no idea language was so... mathematical!

I never could wrap my head around OS theory... that and Compilers were the two classes I just couldn't grok.

I think my favorite was either Chaos and Fractals, or Ethnomethedology, both of which I took as January-term classes. (My college was on a system where the 1st semester was over at Christmas break, but the 2nd didn't start until February. During January, you took 1 class, but met for 3-4 hours a day. It was encouraged to use this to take classes that you might not have time or opportunity to take during the regular semester.)

Although the linguistics and cognitive science courses I took along the way were interesting too.

Quid

I'm really enjoying my Chinese class right now. 1:3 teacher to student ratio, nice technology in the classroom (whoo smart board!), and generally interesting topic material. Before this my favorite class was probably Algebra I with a teacher that hit talking students with plastic toy sword and sprayed sleeping ones with water.