{"id":1357,"date":"2007-08-20T00:49:36","date_gmt":"2007-08-20T05:49:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2007\/08\/20\/best-class-ever\/"},"modified":"2007-08-20T00:49:36","modified_gmt":"2007-08-20T05:49:36","slug":"best-class-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2007\/08\/20\/best-class-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"Best Class Ever"},"content":{"rendered":"

Female Science Professor<\/a> talks about the frustrations associated with making sure your class has a decent room and all that fun stuff, especially when it’s a small interdisciplinary freshman seminar. The irony, of course, is that an off-the-beaten path course on a topic that the professor is really passionate about is much more likely to end up being the Best Class Ever for the enrolled students than any of the inevitable required courses, but they will always get the short end of the stick when it comes to scheduling and logistics.<\/p>\n

But it got me thinking about the concept of the Best Class Ever. What is it that makes a college course especially memorable, years down the line? After at least fifteen seconds of quality rumination over my own experiences, two common features stand out. First, the professor was absolutely enthusiastic about the material; they weren’t just punching a clock, they were truly into<\/em> it. Second, a very delicate balance was struck, in which the material was ultimately understandable (and interesting, it goes without saying), but also extremely challenging. The best classes were those in which you learned an incredible amount, but only after really sweating for it. Other than that, my favorite classes didn’t really have much in common; they were a remarkably heterogeneous group.<\/p>\n

My favorite undergrad class, and also my favorite non-science class (among many strong contenders), was probably “Contemporary Political Images,” taught by philosopher-turned-social-theorist Jack Doody<\/a>. We covered a lot of political and social theory — Marx, Rawls, Habermas, Leo Strauss, Alasdair MacIntyre, that kind of thing. It was a small seminar, and an indispensable ingredient of the class’s awesomeness was the talent and enthusiasm of the other students. Every week we were wrestling with Big Ideas about Virtue and The Good, and some of the best conversations were over breakfast in the dining hall before class. And years later, when Clarence Thomas mumbled something about Natural Law<\/a> at his confirmation hearings, we all knew exactly what was going through his mind.<\/p>\n

My favorite class in grad school, and also my favorite science class (without quite as many strong contenders) was probably Nick Warner’s<\/a> general relativity course at MIT. I was a grad student at the liberal-arts college up the river, but Ted Pyne and I happily hopped on the Red Line twice a week to attend this course, given the sorry state of Harvard’s GR offerings at the time. This was a big lecture course, with detailed hand-written notes handed out beforehand, and there wasn’t too much in-class discussion — Nick talked awfully fast, and it’s not easy to stop that much momentum once it gets built up. (But there was a weekly recitation where we could ask whatever crazy questions popped into our heads.) Every week we were pushed to the limit, and loved it. We must have loved it, as Ted and I taught our own seminar to our fellow grad students the next year, and I went on to teach the course as a postdoc, and then as a professor, and write up my own notes<\/a>, which eventually made it into a book<\/a>. In the foreword of which, Nick gets a hearty acknowledgment.<\/p>\n

So what were your best college classes ever? Feel free to provide supporting evidence and anecdotes, and reason inductively from there to a comprehensive theory of class awesomeness.<\/p>\n

(I won’t reveal the best class ever from a teacher’s<\/em> perspective — like children, they’re all my favorites.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Female Science Professor talks about the frustrations associated with making sure your class has a decent room and all that fun stuff, especially when it’s a small interdisciplinary freshman seminar. The irony, of course, is that an off-the-beaten path course on a topic that the professor is really passionate about is much more likely to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}