The strangest college courses I took

Now that I've had the chance to live 40 plus years on this planet and had some time to reflect on it, I am not a big fan of institutionalized education the likes of which was basically forced upon us back in the 90's. When I say "forced" I mean that you were constantly pressured from 11th grade onward to attend a university of some sort. The various counselors would come into our classrooms to give us a pitch and from time to time college representatives would come in and give us presentations about how wonderful their university was. The crazy thing that I can now recall is that very little of these presentations actually focused on education but rather focused on the "fun" side of things that this particular university had to offer.

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They also had these wonderful stories about how you could attend even if you didn't have any money and their financial aid department would see to it that everyone who qualified academically would likely be able to find the money in order to attend. What they didn't talk about was that you would be strapped with loan debt for the next 30 years of your life and that your education very likely doesn't actually include any skills that are going to result in a rewarding career that pays well.

This isn't always true, but let's be honest: There are a lot of stupid-ass degree programs out there that have no real market value. The various colleges and universities seem to know this as well but do a good job of concealing it. Somewhere along the lines of time it was determined that 4 years is a good amount of time to spend in college to prepare you for life outside of it and because there aren't actually 4 years worth of relevant coursework, they needed some filler or as they like to call it, "electives."

This is how they manage to drag college out into a 4 year program because you can not graduate without a certain number of electives. These are almost always cakewalk classes that are meant to bring your GPA up from having underperformed in other, relevant classes. Here are a few of the more absurd ones that I took.

Bowling

I already liked to bowl and was pretty decent at it. I also couldn't imagine anyone who bothered to turn up not getting an A in the class so i signed up. As you might imagine there wasn't any course materials and we simply went to the local bowling alley to bowl for an hour under the guidance of a pro bowler who cared a LOT MORE about the sport than we do.

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_{Hooray! Easy "A"!}

If you wanted to smoke cigarettes during "class" you were welcome to do so. Some of the more bold students ordered beers. This wasn't the 60's folks, this was the mid 90's.

I was a business major at the time and it makes sense that we would need this skill to excel in the business world because lots of deals are brokered over nachos at the lanes.

Everyone in the class got an "A" and all it cost them was probably about 10 times what it would cost to go bowling twice a week for a semester.

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Jazz Appreciation

Another class that is almost a guaranteed A if you bother to turn up. This class had a professor with zero credentials other than being a jazz musician and 30 year of being a fan of the genre. This guy, who's name i do not recall, was one of the strangest people I have ever seen.

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Keep in mind that we were not musicians, we were just listening to cassettes and CD's (this was before MP3s) and meant to appreciate the music as our instructor obviously did. He would walk around the the classroom "scit-scatting" and saying "oh man! dig man, dig!" and was one of the most animated professors that I ever encountered. It's too bad that this has zero educational value and other than listening to "A Train" about 50 times in the semester I remember almost nothing other than the fact the professor would have made a great Muppet's character.

There were no tests and everyone who attended 80% or more of the classes got an "A."

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History of Computing

This was an elective recommended to anyone in the Computer Science department which I was not but my degree was in Information Systems so it was close enough.

This class was another absurdly easy class that I'm pretty sure no one was allowed to fail. I didn't even attend very often because the textbook was like a children's novel. I got to know the professor by stopping by his office during office hours and making sure that he remembered who I am. The class was very popular and well-known for being an easy A and was in a colosseum style classroom where no attendance was ever taken.

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In this class we were made aware of the technological advancements in computing throughout all time but never learned how any of it actually worked. I don't know what sort of career being aware that the Babbage Engine existed or that ROM means "read only memory" but that was basically the entire course. I read the $100 textbook (kinda) attended maybe 10% of the classes and aced the final exam. There were no projects, there were no other tests and this suggests to me that you were probably not allowed to do poorly in this class.

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Scuba Diving

This class holds a special place in my heart because we were all given "incomplete" grades on our college records because none of us got certified. This is because in order to get certified you had to do a certain number of dives in the ocean, which were called off because of a hurricane. So due to an "act of God" the "professor" determined that all of us need to fail the course.

One class action lawsuit later and all of us were giving A's and the professor was fired.

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Another aspect of this class is that I didn't do very well in it because I didn't care. This was supposed to be an easy A but the assistant instructors were merely wasteoids that had no educational background and were merely Divemasters (a certification you can get while drunk on holiday in Mexico in under a month) and these guys were mostly employed at pizza delivery shops or mobile phone stores. They now had a chance to bully people in a college setting.

If you were a hot chick, you did well. If you were a dude that the hot chicks would be more inclined to actually like, the entirely male divemaster team would do everything they could in order to dock points from you.

I remember during one evaluation that one guy, who I actually knew and didn't like from having met in clubs was my evaluator. He nitpicked all of my skills and eventually gave me a score of 60%. During that same trial I saw the hot chick in the class make and uncontrolled ascent to the surface, coughing and choking and spitting water being consoled by the same ass-hat and she walked away from that examination with a score of 90%. I could have sued the pants off of that school based on that one evaluation alone.

The irony behind this is that years later I would move to Thailand and get a certification in diving that is significantly higher than all of these "instructors."

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I would imagine that this sort of "padding" exists in colleges all around the world but it is omnipresent in American universities. If we just stuck to relevant coursework everyone would graduate in 2 years, 1 if you were really keen. But of course universities are businesses masquerading as educational facilities and therefore this will never happen. I think they are trash and most of the people that i know that are truly successful in life, didn't go. The people that I do know that used their uni education to achieve financial success in life are almost exclusively educators themselves now... and what does that say?

Did you take any stupid college classes? I'd love to hear about them if you did.