What Would You Do if…?

Thomas (who writes the My Porch blog ) came up with a good way to spend a few minutes:

If you could back to school, what would you study? Thomas describes it as “a kind of academic fantasy camp”, as there would be no worries about grades or tests, nothing stressful – just the chance to learn about something that you never had the time to study in school. (Or perhaps it’s a later interest…)

So the big question:

If you could take a semester studying anything you wanted, what kind of classes would you take?

Rules:

• Assume everything in your life is manageable (e.g. bills are fine, job would be held for you, family isn’t neglected, no financial problems, you would not have to work etc.)
• Choose classes that you would want to take just for the fun of taking them. (That is: stay away from stuff that would get you a promotion at work or help you finish a degree etc. This is your chance to explore anything you want just out of intellectual curiosity.)
• Extra points for being specific.
• Double extra points for saying where you would want to spend your semester.

Course list:

• A couple of sweeping literary introduction overviews (so long as they included a variety of non-canonical works)
• Linguistics – perhaps a history of American dialect or similar. (Already familiar with History of the English language.)
• Something on the social history of Victorian life in both England and US (probably more of an emphasis on US life, of course)
• Astronomy – I am interested in the stars, but cannot see the individual star shapes unless their lines drawn between them like dot-to-dot
• A foreign language – perhaps a refresher course on French or an intro to Latin
• A intro (not-for-engineers) course on sustainable energy
• A photography course ( to include technical how-to as well as on-location shooting)

I think that list should keep me busy for a semester or two. I wouldn’t want to work for a grade or anything, but just to attend the course to learn would be great! As for where I would study… Hmm.  I wouldn’t mind somewhere very different from here, perhaps an East Coast Ivy League school or somewhere in Colorado? Or Oxford or Cambridge in UK?

But – please! I am *begging* you. Don’t put me in a freshman dorm….

🙂