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University Offers Class In Zombie Studies
Young people at The University of Baltimore will be able to study the zombie condition thanks to the newly available English 333. Students in the class will watch 16 classic zombie films and read zombie comics. Instead of writing a final research paper they may write a script or draw storyboards for their own zombie movie. Unfortunately the class doesn't seems to cover brain appreciation.
It's clear from this class that Universities feel they need to cultivate ... MORE BRAINS!!!!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
If they'd taught this class anywhere other than Baltimore they might run out of fresh corpses to zombify.
It's just an English literature/writing class with a narrow focus on zombie fiction. It's not THAT big a deal, or even all that uncommon. Lots of schools have similar classes with focus in comics, sci-fi movies, golden age cinema, and even pornography. It's an effort to un-stuffy the traditional curriculum, but it's no less legitimate than "bible as literature" that most colleges offers. In fact, considering the zombie overtones of the Jesus mythos, it's VERY similar.
As predicted, I already saw a bunch of comments on the original story with parents saying they'd be "angry if their kid wasted their money" on something like this, etc. etc.
In reality, it all depends on the instructor and their willingness to teach useful material. I remember when I was in college, I took a "History of Rock Music" course that the vast majority of people joked about and blew off as one of those "underwater basket-weaving" type classes you'd just take for an easy credit. In actuality, the instructor was a PhD in music who didn't even like rock music very much. He simply realized that most STUDENTS did, however, so it was a topic that held a lot of interest to them. He warned us from day 1 that "if you're expecting this to be an easy, blow-off class, you may want to drop out now". It turns out, he went into considerable depth about the roots of rock music and showed us the links between aspects of contemporary rock music and other forms of music that came before it. We covered what was essentially outright theft of R&B or Soul music of the 50's and 60's, as white musicians redid the original songs as early "pop/rock hits" and compared the original works to the "covers" or "re-makes". We had to write detailed reports and present them in class, discussing artists we felt were significant to the rock music genre and justify that position with facts and details. Essentially, it served as a writing course, an oral communications course, AND a history course all in one, and I think most of us got a lot out of it. (I was playing guitar in a local band at the time, so it seemed like a relevant elective course to take. I left with a little bit better presentation/public speaking skills and an ability to listen to music more critically than before. Really not a bad course at all.)
If the "in" thing is zombies, then great! Why not use it as a "hook" to get people in to a course that's going to teach them a lot about scriptwriting and the basic requirements for making a good movie? Again though, this could *easily* be abused too, if the wrong instructor is teaching it -- because the topic itself means very little. (Unless you REALLY believe the zombies are coming to take over the world -- you probably feel like learning about zombies is pretty pointless to spend college money on!) It's all about how the topic is used to teach something that goes beyond it.
Knowing the right way to handle a zombie apocalypse may come in handy. Most people are quite unprepared, and will think someone murmuring "braiiins" is a political candidate canvassing the neighborhood for this election year.
Plus, a class like this is always a nice thing to take for an elective -- everyone loves a cold one.
Well, given that it is a course numbered '333', it's really on half as evil as possible.....
I see you have an English degree... [burns resume]
Fixed that for you.
Can I get a degree on porn? With lab classes??? Where do I sign?
While I was wasting time getting my Physics degree, just to see the whole tech space outsourced to India and China, these kids were getting the type of education they can count on. Skills like zombie-movie screenplay writing are a smart move in any economy, let's see them outsource that!
My favorite quote doesn't fit into 120 characters. Now no one will like me.
This sounds really cool until you realize that someone is actually going to get paid good money to teach students, most of whom will be going into debt to participate, a subject which has literally no value whatsoever to the market. The humanities and liberal arts are not training people in the classical curricula anymore (which actually DID teach them how to think) and instead are getting students 10s and even 100s of thousands of dollars in debt.
This is probably one the harshest, but most accurate statements I've read about what this level of useless content paid for with debt is doing to the lives of students:
I studied a zombie movie in my modern drama class, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, an important milestone in German film and a chilling insight into the stress between authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism in Weimar Germany.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
They should combine it with Modern Political Studies.
Table-ized A.I.
Direct link to the original article (instead of the yahoo rebroadcast): http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-us-odd-zombie-class,0,2027516.story
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The students are pretty much zombies.
Does anyone else find it odd that this is a Junior-level college course in English, and the course is limited to zombie movies and comic books? If you want to study zombie movies, go to film studies. I can accept using zombie comic books, but few, if any, zombie comic books I've seen would qualify as quality literature. (Yes, some comic books do qualify as quality literature, just not those.) The real travesty for these students is that this course could actually be leveraging an interest in zombies to actually study good literature, like World War Z, the Zombie Survival Guide, the zombie Jane Austen books, and various fiction books from different eras in the evolution of the modern zombie. (The history of the zombie concept is quite the story.) Instead, they get to watch movies and read comic books.
This is the real signature
(Beats those shadows on the cave wall, don't it?)
Because there are real consequences to going $50k in debt to get an English or Art History degree. People graduating with six figure student loan debts from programs that don't reliably lead to six figure jobs have gotten pretty common.
You know what that level of debt for a degree that provides no discernible practical job skills does to a typical person? It reduces their options on career choice, relationships and ability to save and buy property.
Yeah, you're now an "interesting person" because you know all about some obscure figures in the humanities. A typical person going that route will also not be able to save for a down payment on a house or condo, have to find a significant other willing to put up with and be able to support a serious debt load and will likely still go to a shitty job at that the end of the day.
But oh yeah, they were "taught how to think" or they can pursue a degree in law, even as that means more student loan debt for a degree in a field that has a serious labor glut.
You're absolutely right. People should not go to college specifically to learn how to do something that will enable their future. That's for those filthy stinking tradesmen who make serious money getting dirty working with their hands.
BTW, this also presumes that you are in the lucky 50% who does graduate and can find a good job. God help the help people who go into student loan debt and then cannot graduate for whatever reason. Hopefully their memories of lectures on medieval French poetry will be a consolation when they make their payments.