the Sam Jackson College Experience

Looking to study for the SAT or just expand your vocabulary generally? Do you like words, and find them fun? Turn your back on those who might call you strange and keep reading…

1. Read a book online! You can get loads for free on Google Books (a lot? who knows!) or the Gutenberg project (over 20,000 free books). Or you can of course order one online from Amazon. Sorry, I know, books are a gimme, but people don’t read enough these days so I wanted to put it on the list.
2. Play Scrabulous! on Facebook or off it. Scrabble, even more addictive and accessible than ever. Always a great way to learn words. Look up what you don’t know, all while you try to make new words! If you aren’t familiar with the Facebook application which lets you play against your friends, check it out now. There goes your productivity. Sorry.
3. Play FreeRice. You guess words’ meanings and every correct answer donates rice to the United Nations towards ending world hunger. Feel good about learning new words… really really good!
4. Eric Barnes of ePrep sent me a link to their new WordSmith vocabulary game, which inspired me to make this post about a couple ways you can learn new SAT words. Key feature here is a ladderboard which adds a nice competitive element, so also worth checking out.

Our friends at CollegeDegree.com have put together a really great list of quite bizarre college courses. Yale has its fair share of these, especially through the residential college seminar program, though none got recognized for the list here.

Devising exciting course names is a careful art, from the one-word pleasers (I shopped a mathy philosophy course on the basis of its name alone, “Infinity,” this past term) to the tongue-twisting alliteration masters. This list has some pretty good ones and you’d be well advised to check out these courses if given the chance . The full list of 25 strangest college courses is available at the CollegeDegree site, but here are a few of my excerpted picks, in no particular order:

Art of Walking: Kentucky’s Centre College is stoked about its new class the Art of Walking, which plans to discover how Immanuel Kant’s writings can reveal “a new way [of understanding] a pleasure apparently foreign to aesthetics but very much at home in human nature: the pleasure of walking,” according to author and professor Ken Keffer. Maybe the course should also grant credit to health and fitness degrees?

The Adultery Novel In and Out of Russia: University of Pennsylvania’s Slavics Department holds that no topic is too taboo for the classroom. Students will learn about the “sociological descriptions of modernity, Marxist examinations of family as a social and economic institution [and] Freudian/ Psychoanalytic interpretations of family life and transgressive sexuality,” among other topics.

The Science of Harry Potter: Don’t tell me that Harry Potter isn’t all magic? Maryland’s Frostburg University provides this honors seminar, which is actually a physics class that investigates the supposed magic of Harry Potter.

Maple Syrup: The Real Thing: Alfred University makes this list twice with its now famous course, Maple Syrup: The Real Thing. The course description reads, “the method of producing maple syrup is one of the things in our society that has endured even in today’s culture of constant change,” which is why it deserves an entire semester of attention and dissection. Students mustn’t worry though, as the course comes with a neat disclaimer: “No prior experience expected.”

Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism: Associate professor Sandy Lawrence teaches this course at Mount Holyoke College wants her students to “to be aware that while racism disadvantages people of color, it provides benefits to whites. By examining the other side of racism–whiteness–we can see the advantages in education, heath care, and employment that white people continually accrue.” Lawrence’s ultimate and noble goal is to help her students combat racism, but I think we already knew that whites are the prime beneficiaries of what our country has to offer.

Philosophy and Star Trek: Georgetown University in Washington D.C., claims that “Star Trek is very philosophical. What better way, then, to learn philosophy, than to watch Star Trek, read philosophy, and hash it all out in class?” I ask you, what better way? Well, we hate to say this, but The Art of Walking might be one answer. [Sam's note--the list also features "Star Trek and Religion"]

As for the science of Harry Potter, I read The Science of Harry Potter while at the MIT coop a couple summers ago. Fun reading (buying through that link gives me a few cents! Written by the science editor of London’s Daily Telegraph.) although the book probably needs to be updated for the last 5 years of wizarding “science.” Yale–my residential college, in fact!–is offering a seminar this spring about Harry Potter and theology. Some pretty good material out there, apparently–I snuck a peak at the course’s reading list at the bookstore.

Anyhow, the list is great, I highly recommend you check it out, the link is again here.

Hey everyone! Sorry that I have been away so long. I had a lot of fun in Russia and Yale’s second semester has been going great, it’s just been really, really, really busy and as important as all my readers and this blog are to me, I don’t want to flunk out of school! Then I’d have a lot less to write about. Things have calmed down a little bit and I estimate that I am now down to maybe only 4 days “behind the work curve” i.e., it would only require me 4 days of completely free time to totally catch up on everything I have to do. If anyone has a time-stasis machine or a secret ultra-life-hacker website they’d care to share, let me know. Otherwise I will just try to plow on through. New posts

resume now! And by now I mean soon… right after this sociology paper.

Russia is really a very interesting and fun place to visit, I highly recommend going if you find someone russian-speaking to take you! Also, it’s still fun to go in the winter as I did, and airfare is cheaper… things are very pretty in winter! I wouldn’t mind going back in summer when fountains would be operating everywhere and I could enjoy more sunlight, of course.