Most impressive course you've taken?

[Quintillus]

I'm curious which academic courses you've taken that have really stood out as not only well-taught, but also somewhat unusual in their approach.

I've taken plenty of well-taught and enjoyable courses, on topics as diverse as world history and computer architecture. But the most impressive one I've taken in its approach was a political thought course I took in high school. The basic format was that we'd study certain political movements in the U.S., with a focus on the more fringe ones, and then have a speaker come in from that movement to discuss it with the class (and sometimes, a speaker from an opposing movement as well). The impressive part was the diversity of speakers that were brought in, that it was always civil despite the very extreme viewpoints of some of the speakers, and that it was well-balanced so as not to endorse any of the viewpoints, nor indeed even revealing the teacher's own political position, but be purely educational and thought-provoking.

Examples of speakers represented included a leader of the local Green Party, a representative of the Nation of Islam, the leader of the National Socialist party in the state, and a representative of the Anti-Defamation League. It was striking to me how much more real the movements seemed when hearing an actual representative of them speak than reading about them in a textbook. Reading about what the Nazis believe in textbooks, it's easy to think, even if subconsciously, that no one really believes that when you're only used to the mainstream. Actually hearing someone expressing those views, you realize that some people really do believe in the fringe political movements.

The other impressive thing about the course was that it was possible at a public high school. I'd generally expect the U.S. to be too focused on political correctness to allow extremely non-mainstream speakers to talk to students.

 

[Kennigit]

An elective course I took my last semester was extremely well taught. I felt I learned more in that class than many other classes put together, and was pretty consistently applying what I learned in that class to my other classes (which, often is not the case).

Was on light water reactor operations; or, the theoretical basis and engineering principles for design, operation, and control of LWRs through looking at plant systems and components

Mainly relating to steady state and transient operating conditions (i.e. understanding start up, shut down, plant response to changes in load/turbine or feedwater flow, etc), reactivity control and reactivity feedbacks from an operating standpoint (i.e. not detailed physics modelling but reactivity coefficients), and safety systems.

It was the only course I felt like an engineer in, and the professor not only dedicated an extraordinary effort in presenting the course material, but gave numerous additional resources to consult and go over in class.

Although we had a textbook, we didn't really consult it much. It was more "I know how this stuff works, let me drop 10,000 knowledge bombs on you guys and share my experience with you".

 

[Kyriakos]

I cannot readily think of any uni course i took which was due to its subject that interesting. Of course some professors were great, while others (most, sadly..) were not just bad in being a professor, but also jerks :\

So i suppose a course in the second year, about 'philosophy in art', was more memorable than my other ones, since the professor was (is? he likely is there still) very good-natured and interesting. Sadly he mostly focused on Bataille, and...well...Bataille is a bit on the porn-catholic side of strange

But most of the courses were on german or greek philosophy, and i was extremely lazy/uninterested as a student.

 

[Borachio]

Topology.

I can't say it was well-taught, but it did make a major impression on me.

I rather think it fried my brain. I may never recover.

 

[madviking]

i'll just tell yall my three most favorite courses in college.

my second year i took a class called 'unsolved mysteries of the universe'. it talked about all kinda of crazy stuff: quantem mechanics, relativity (general and special), stellar nucleosynthesis, big bang theories, alternate dimensions, parallel universes. essentially, it was a pop theoretical physics class which also combined elements of mathematics and philosophy and making stuff up.

at the same time as 'unsolved mysteries', i took a philosophy class called 'know thyself'. the class covered introspection, from the greeks to buddhists to modern psychology and sociology. it was a very deeply personal class, as what you learn in the class kinda hits home really close. i also managed to take it the last semester it was offered.

my last class of note was a material science course called 'materials that shaped civilization'. it covered metallurgy from antiquity to modern times and how a lot of human development can be explained by our inability to melt iron until very recently (bessemer). pottery and glass making were also covered, along with alloying, steeling, many, many other things.

 

[Tahuti]

'unsolved mysteries of the universe'

TBH, this sounds like a History Channel programme.

 

[madviking]

it was very legitimate

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Courses on how to read and analyze biological primary literature by a well-motivated professor with teaching skills in abundance. I'm still surprised how often reading the discussion section before the results leads to better and quicker understanding of the material.

 

[Kyriakos]

I don't even recall the full titles (rather expanded) of any of the 12 (or a bit more due to a couple of half-year ones there) courses i took in Uni.

I think that 3 of them (or 2) were on Nietzsche. One was on Ethics and i ended up choosing the essay subject on Aristotle, and i don't recall any of that either apart from the title of his book. There were a few literature-related ones. There was one pitiful 'Psychology' class, related to Philosophy, and the professor for that looked like a 50-year old fetus (and behaved like an infant with a bad secret). Another horrible course was run by a german professor (hated him from the start, but in fact he managed to hate me even before that ). A red-haired Scottish female professor was very cool

 

[Wrymouth3]

I'm a history major about to go get the MA in graduate school. When I was an undergraduate, I had to take 9 credits of natural science classes, and ended up taking all astronomy classes. The first was a simple "Introduction to Astronomy" which of course most students truly thought was a "OOOOOH I get to memorize the names of the moons of Jupiter!" They were wrong. The second and third classes, I for some reason thought it would be an excellent idea to take and "Introduction to Astrophysics" class and a class on "Galactic Astronomy." I have never been so happy to recieve two C pluses in my life.

 

[Paul in Saudi]

The Naval War College by correspondence. Maybe I was at the right stage in my life to absorb the information, but was exceptionally well-written.

(By the way, the acquisition system is so broke that it will never be fixed.)

 

[downtown]

A lot of my college classes sort of blend together now, but I remember taking an excellent class on big city mayors and how inner city elections work from a professor that worked for multiple mayors of Boston (at American U). I had some great classes on Ohio politics, inner city school systems, and electioneering at Ohio State as well. The best ones were ones small class sizes and were centered around case studies, rather than lecture hall theory stuff.

I think the best lecture hall class I had was on formal logic. I've probably forgotten almost everything I learned from the rest of my gen-ed lectures that had 300 people in them.

 

[Formaldehyde]

I guess it would have to be the mandatory semester-long Americanism vs Communism course taught in Florida public schools in the 12th grade during the 60s and early 70s.

What made it so impressive was that the intent was to assure that every single Floridian was well-versed in the deviant and evil nature of communism versus the wholesome and goodly aspects of Americanism just before they finished their public school education. That it was a safety net for those who hadn't been paying any attention at all to current affairs and the supposed Cold War.

But by the time I took the class the curriculum had radically changed. The Vietnam War was winding down and the Domino Theory had been all but completely debunked. It had ironically become a much more objective analysis of the pros and cons of both forms of government. It wasn't much longer before it disappeared from the curriculum once the legislators got wind of what had occurred with their mandatory indoctrination program.

 

[warpus]

The most impressive in terms of how much impressive work I had to do to pass, was the OS course at university. I had to build an operating system almost from scratch (barebone code was there, but it didn't do much), running on a virtual hardware environment.

It was incredibly tough and I spent hours every night working on the main project - the OS. We had groups of 3.. but I was tasked with creating the memory allocation code. Well, guess what, memory allocation running on simulated hardware is not easy. We had random memory blocks being allocated and things spiralling out of control.

I couldn't figure out the problem and in the end got our system from a not so stable (crash after 20 seconds) state to a not so stable (crash after 5-7 minutes state)

Our presentation was 5 minutes long.. the memory allocation code held up during the demo

I was really impressed I passed that class with decent marks. It was tough crap.

The most impressive in terms of being the most useless class ever was a sociology class I took which was taught be a self-proclaimed feminist. She showed us pictures of penises, had her baby in class all the time, and couldn't teach worth crap. I stopped going to class but easily passed anyway.

 

[JollyRoger]

Introduction to fiction my freshman year was in one of those massive lecture halls. Dated six coeds from that class, so it was like playing an 18 hole golf course.

 

[nc-1701]

Most of my classes seem to have had a pretty standard teaching style, and it's just a matter of how good the professor was at teaching it and/or how much I liked the material.

I will say that in retrospect I really enjoyed my Principles of Physics Lab class, though at the time I hated it because of the amount of work. But the class was just on motion (projectile, rotational, and forces). Each class we started by doing the math to predict something, then doing an experiment and when our experiment inevitably failed to verify our predictions we had to find the errors that we had made. One assignment I remember particularly fondly was where we had a spring powered cannon and had to predict where it's shot would land. Our grade was based on the accuracy:

From a course content perspective I very much enjoyed: Abstract Algebra, Probability, and Complex Analysis.

Topology.

I can't say it was well-taught, but it did make a major impression on me.

I rather think it fried my brain. I may never recover.

I took Algebraic Topology in grad school last year, and my experience was similar.

Introduction to fiction my freshman year was in one of those massive lecture halls. Dated six coeds from that class, so it was like playing an 18 hole golf course.

I love you. Never change

 

[Daird]

Introduction to fiction my freshman year was in one of those massive lecture halls. Dated six coeds from that class, so it was like playing an 18 hole golf course.

JR, you truly are the most magnificent of bastards.

As for myself, a little over two years ago, I went 15 rounds with quantum mechanics. I vividly recall a dream after a weekend study binge in which quantum effects were observable at macroscopic levels. When I woke, I couldn't help wondering if that was just a dream or a bad hallucinogenic trip. Still, I'm fiercely proud of the B- I managed in such a counterintuitive course.

 

[warpus]

I have a friend who thought it was a great idea to drop acid right before his grade 13 (university prep year) physics exam.

He failed the exam, but somehow passed the class. He was actually pretty good at math, just didn't really give a crap about much.

 

[madviking]

there's a running joke at my school that taking a thermodynamics exam drunk doesn't hurt your performance at all--in fact, if you're drunk, you're more likely to write down random stuff; random stuff that will get your partial credit.

 

[JollyRoger]

I may or may not have taken the Law School Admissions Test under the influence of an illicit substance.