Most enjoyable class you ever took?

In the spirit of Pokerfan's "Most difficult class..." thread, I pose this one.

I'll answer with mine later. Well, that is if this thread doesn't Titanic.

Bear in mind, this doesn't have to be a college or other school class. Maybe you had a hot guitar teacher, or you love your profession so much, you loved the licensing class or something.

Have at it.

Gave me an excuse to spend hours researching the Great Gastonia Textile Strike of 1929

Jealous?

I thought so

Public Speaking. Followed very closely by most of my chemistry classes.

Excellent prof, and the students really brought some great ideas into the discussion. Loved that class.

I also had two independent study courses in Old English that were very enjoyable.

I would have love that--PKD is the weirdest and the best!

In addition to being a fascinating study of PKD, it also gave me a new perspective on the careful reading of a work, which has benefited me hugely. And that's one of the few courses from which I kept all of my textbooks!

I'm still in occasional contact with that prof, and we exchange a few emails whenever one of us stumbles upon a cook PKD-esque factoid or the like.

Upper-level poetry workshop with poet James Harms.

:hi:

It was a January term course taught by a couple theater profs. We went to London for the month, saw a dozen plays, and wrote papers. I liked it so much, I later moved to London and lived there for a brief while after college. :thumbsup:

I had an awesome prof for the class.

Spent the spring sailing around New York Harbor on The Petrel.

Loved the teacher. Loved the subject matter. Loved the lab. Aced the class and blew everyone out of the water on the final - 99.17%.

Missed my calling by a mile just because life intervened. Sigh.

I took a similar class my Sophomore year of high school fell in love with the subject and 10 years later still going strong.

History and English were always my favorite subjects in school and I was pretty much certain that I would major in one of those two subjects...funny how one little high school elective changed my path in life.

I do remember I.C.E., of course, and unfortunately in this household we have to use it a lot.

I doubut the elective changed your path. I bet it just opened your path.

:yoiks:

My first year of HS Public Speaking (I took this class for three years, the latter two were basically just debate team study hall) because we had a lot of fun out of class projects, and I did most of them with people who took school about as seriously as I did :eyes: so they were really fun.

AP Composition my senior year of High School. I finally had a teacher who loved learning and hated school, and that was really freeing to me to realize that somebody else thought all of the bullshit was a waste of time and an obstacle to actual learning too. He quit after that year to unschool his kids. So I owe him on my own behalf, and for putting that crazy idea in my head years before I'd ever need it my kid owes him too.

Honors Seminar in Political Communication. I actually got credit for following politics, writing about it and talking about it with other people. I do that for free anyhow.

college.

The Astronomy class was awesome because there was a huge powerful telescope we could use at night. I saw things in the sky that I never would have seen without that class.

Botany was just so interesting to me. I learned a lot about the life of plants and flowers.

focused on Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" and the works of Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, and Boswell including Boswell's unexpurgated "Life of Johnson," which was a revelation. To this day, my desert island book is the unedited "Life of Johnson," even more than the complete works of Shakespeare.

This was the greatest professor ever; he had the most cutting wit, and he knew how to turn students on to obscure (obscure to us, at that point) works.

UAN is usually one of the first groups to go into a disaster situation to do animal rescue, set up shelters, etc. I was elected to be the team lead dropped into a hypothetical disaster. I went total Mad Max on the poor instructor. She said I was "exceedingly effective, but almost frightening"

That class was awesome.

:rofl:

Yeah, I can see that. :rofl:

Seriously, best class ever! It was an honor's course and we had no text book but I learned more about government then you could possibly imagine. Roughly every day of the first semester we would have a guest speaker that was some way involved in politics (elected official, political aide, candidates, etc...) and we got to essentially grill them about anything. So if you didn't want to look like a fool, it was your responsibility to brush up on current events and policies, it was also our responsibility to call up and book guest speakers as well. On the days where we had no speaker, we would just discuss current events and in the fall of 2001, we had plenty to discuss.

We also were responsible for 4 "outside experiences" each marking period which meant we had to go outside of school and engage in politics some way...such as attend a town council meeting, go door to door for a candidate, attend a debate, etc.

Then we spent an entire marking period practicing for a constitution debate competition. Small groups were given sections of the US Constitution that they had to read up on and be able to answer questions about in front of a panel of judges. Unfortunately our class did not win :(

Finally we went on a 3 day trip to DC which was amazingly fun.

That class definitely helped me form my political identity but the teacher never once said anything partisan the entire year, he let us go out and discover it for ourselves. If all high school civics/government classes were like this one, we would have a nation of informed voters.

It basically confirmed my accusations of humans in general :D

:hi:

At the University of Pennsylvania in 1972. I heard that he went on to be an important guy in the field.

I almost changed my major just because of him (wish I had!).

Contemporary Civil Conflict

A senior Seminar class is college. The profs wanted to take us to a place in conflict, so we spent 5 days in Belfast. That was the greatest class trip I've ever been on.

Intro to rocks and minerals (GEOL 2409)

I love going on geology field trips! It was a small class.... less than ten people and we had a great time even though it was hard.... good professor makes all the difference. There were 3 graduate students in the class and they didn't have any easier of a time than those of us just trying to get the science credit for an AA degree. :)

and Cosmology was a close second, but the math gave me nightmares

I almost went to law school because of her, but changed my mind. Can't remember her name for crap, though, but she rocked.

"Physics for Scientists and Engineers"

Like the xkcd I posted on the other thread, I'm attracted to pure and elemental knowledge:

One of my most difficult was also one of my most enjoyable.

And any horseback riding class I ever had would be in the most enjoyable category also.

The Cartography class had at times 20 hours per week of outside work but it was thoroughly enjoyable.

A meteorology class I took was 5 days per week at 8am :crazy: but a terrific class at covering the fundamentals taught by three different professors (one a tornado chaser :crazy:).

Professor was awesome.

It was team taught, we had novel and interesting projects, it met five days a week. What a great way to learn to make art.

I am rather left brained and did not think I would enjoy Art History but I did.

It was taught by a PhD student in a summer session so we went every day. He gave great lectures that didn't gloss over any less-than-savory aspects of history. My favorite lecture was on how Texas saved rock and roll (hint: Buddy Holly).

First Runner Up - My Shakespeare class in college. The professor made the plays come alive and used humor and common modern language to make things make sense to us.

I can't remember why exactly I liked it: The teacher was great, but beyond that I can't say why a grammar class was so fun.

I meant to use a semi, of course!

or whatever the lower-division class was called. I remember getting into some spirited discussions with the prof and fellow students. I was fortunate to have less than 30 in the class. Very good time.

That course on Sweden had a great prof. and was surprisingly fascinating.

I enjoyed Environmental Science, too.

Would love to have majored in it but I wasn't sure what to do with it after school.

relevant supreme court decisions regarding labor and unions.

It was probably also the most difficult but was the most interesting. I only had to take the 3000 level but I was tough and took the 4000.

though I must say that a class I had to drop at Penn due to workload reasons had a lot of potential. It was a survey course about-- Christ this was a long time ago-- the Middle Ages or Europe or both, I'm not sure which. Regardless, the professor kicked it off with "Mass death! This is a class about mass death!" Got our attention, I can tell you.

Folk, Blues, Jazz and Rock.

I'm taking an online course with the same teacher this summer called intro to world music.

I also really liked Jacobean Shakespear a couple of years ago.

Most difficult- organic chemistry by a mile.

Oh, I also loved World Masterpieces this semester. I just like school.

(Which I never got to study until grad school.)

the Prof. was on Papua New Guinea pre-war, war and post-war as
an anthropologist. Amazing class...

Tikki

But it was awesome. The War and Aggression professor is pretty much the world's foremost serial killer expert.

For a language buff like me it was heaven: six hours a day of just language classes. We took the equivalent of an undergraduate major in twelve months.

P.S..... anyone familiar with a Chicago-based performer named Kristen Lems? Her mother was the teacher......Also took some very cool popular culture classes in the University of New Mexico's American Studies Dept. including one focusing on the 60's through the music of Bob Dylan. Professor was a fellow musician ( a killer bluegrass banjo player)

Took that class my second-to-last semester of college, and it was a blast. The professor was an old guy, but his mind was as sharp as a razor - there were almost 50 people on that class, and he knew everybody's name on the second day. We read a lot of fantasy stories (including the Lord of the Rings trilogy in the middle of the semester) and discussed the ideas, themes, and meanings in the stories. Amazing class.

The lectures were brutally boring, but I got to spend a lot of time writing using the school's Synclavier system.

I also liked the Fencing course I took. The teacher was on the Olympic team and she was bad ass.

It was my first pure Physics class, and I felt I was home. I was 36 yrs old and going to school with kids half my age. There was a lot I learned in those few years about our ability to retain what we're taught, our ability to quickly call it up in our memories, and how we lose it as we age. But in the pure math classes, I stood toe-to-toe with the best of 'em. I remember realizing in real time that not only could I have done this, but that I WAS doing it. Better than sex, baby. Well anyway, you know what I mean...

Loved it!

my college, University of Lowell, now University of Massachusetts Lowell, had a requirement of 2 semesters of 'gym'; Pass/Fail class. I took archery my first semester and it was OK.

In my senior year, I needed to take another and signed up and got bowling (big ball). Every Tuesday afternoon, you'd goto the bowling alley, pay $3 and you'd bowl 3 strings a session. Then we'd hit the 11th Frame Lounge in the alley afterwards.

To pass, you needed to be able to not throw a gutter ball. Needless to say, everyone passed.

It basically dealt with literature, film and music and how they attempt to convey things to which words do not easily describe. Fascinating stuff....plus it was an evening class, so it felt like a club more than a class.