Class Time

I am enrolled in six classes this quarter. No, this is not an April Fools joke.

I can't make up my mind which classes to take for Spring Quarter, and the reason isn't just because they all look so good. After taking what I think are far too many disorganized, uninteresting and just plain difficult classes (and any rising third-year like myself will tell you, there are many out there), I want to pick my battles carefully. But this time I'm just stumped.

I attended three classes on Monday, and five on Tuesday. Below I will explain what I liked and didn't like about each class. But first, let me define what constitutes a "good class" from where I stand now: A good class will engage my mind, both in discussions/lectures and in the assigned readings. Papers and exams will challenge me, but reflect concrete material directly from the course. I should leave class each day feeling that thick, energizing, "I learned something today" feeling that I feed off of. And if it's no good, I want an easy A. (Though most students here will tell you that such grades for all intents and purposes don't exist.)

Is this the definition of a U of C-student pipe dream? Maybe. But here is a short list of my very best classes:


*Introduction to the Humanities with Larry McEnerney and Kathy Cochran, Autumn 2007-Spring, 2008

*20th Century Art with Christine Mehring, Winter 2009

*Intervention and Public Practice with Theaster Gates Spring, 2008

*Problems in the Study of Sexuality with Stuart Michaels and Anthony Todd, Autumn 2008

*Legal Reasoning with Dennis Hutchinson, Autumn 2008

*US-Mexico Borderlands with Gilberto Rosas, Winter 2009

*The Holocaust and the Visual Arts with Lawrence Michael Tymkiw, Winter 2009

It should be noted that only one of these is a core class. I probably should save elaboration for another post, but I have massive problems with the fantastical chimera known as the Core that is paraded around the University of Chicago by admissions reps and certain tenured professors like a carnival attraction. At its best, the core curriculum is something fun to look at; at worst, it's a rip off.


I am almost finished with the core curriculum, a heady mixture of Plato for Physicists and Science for Somnabulants (sorry social scientists). I didn't get into Global Warming this quarter, a 250-seat class in the Kent lecture hall into which more than fifty students tried to transfer on Monday. I also had little luck with Art of the East: China, too, a 50-seater survey course for my prospective Art History major. But the rest of my prospect look all too good:

Monday, 1:30 pm, I attend Writing Law. This course is a requirement for my other major, Law, Letters and Society, and it's taught by possibly my two favorite professors, Kathy and Larry. We will almost entirely be writing and workshopping briefs and memos, meaning the class has a distinctly "un-U of C" practical component to it (which I love). But the theoretical question that concerned and consumed my First-year Humanities class is still the same: How does language shape the way we think?

3:00 pm, I attend Legal History: Race, Sex and Sexuality. And am I ever intimidated. Co-taught by Amy Stanley from the History department and Mary Case from the Law School, this course interweaves primary sources and court cases to address the ways diversity has been addressed in society and the law. The class is roughly 1/3 law students, 1/3 LLSO majors like me, and 1/3 gender historians. We will be required to write one 20 page paper by 10th week. Oof.


Tuesday, noon, I attend the Politics of Mass Incarceration with Jessica Neptune. She informs me and at least ten other students at the start of class that the wait list is already fifteen students deep, basically nixing our chances of getting seats. I hop down the stairs of Cobb Hall to my scheduled noon class, America in World Civilizations with James Sparrow. I'm required to take this class for the Core, but I don't mind. After introductions, Sparrow spent the class leading us students through a close reading of Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" as an introduction to American attitudes toward 19th century imperialism. I hope the next classes will engage us with the material this thoroughly.

1:30 p.m. I sit in on Ralph Ubl's Theory of Collage, a three-hour seminar crammed to capacity with grad students and upperclassmen in the Art History major, for just long enough to snag a syllabus filled with Rosalind Krauss and Clemente Greenberg readings. Then I sneak across the hall to Art of the East: China, taught by Wu Hung, only to learn that I am competing against at least 15 other people for five open seats.

3:00 p.m. I am actually enrolled in this class—thank goodness. It's Masculinity in America, Past and Present with Anthony Todd, another favorite professor of mine from last Autumn.

This blog post reads like a mini-course catalogue, and I still have to choose between two Wednesday classes: Performance Installation or the Mexican and Argentinian Press.