I was looking over my academic record a few days ago, preparing to sign up for fall classes, when the absurdity of my near-complete liberal arts education struck me.
Maybe I'd paid too close attention to the first chapter of Thoreau's \Walden,"" which I'd read earlier in the day for an English class, but a lot of the classes I'd taken looked, well, useless.
I took a quick tally of classes I thought had somehow enriched my intellectual status, changed my view of the world or had some practical application for me. For my freshman year, my ratio of useful to useless credits was nine to 29. That's 31 percent.
Of course, as my academic career has progressed, I've taken more and more credits that were actually worth my parents' money. But 31 percent? There has to be a better way.
Almost all of the useless classes I've taken, I took because of requirements.
UW said I needed two semesters of a foreign language. So I took two semesters of Spanish.
I offer myself as evidence that two semesters of training won't provide a beginner with any valuable grasp of a foreign language. Hell, I only vaguely remember how to ask where the bathroom is, and even if I could do that, any response given to me in Spanish would fall on uncomprehending ears.
For as much as my education would help me in a Spanish-speaking country, I might as well have taken two semester-long classes on how to point urgently at my genitals while repeating ""Pee-pee.""
The quantitative reasoning requirement, you ask? To fill that one, I took an elementary math class specifically designed for people looking to satisfy that obligation without getting into heavy arithmetic.
Of course I figured it would be easy, but any student who takes that class, doesn't get an ""A"" and has not recently suffered a head injury should send a fruit basket to the admissions people.
With what I learned in that math class, I couldn't balance the withdrawal/deposit sheet for a nine-year-old's piggy bank, let alone my own checkbook. As this example shows, it's not so much what is required of us before we graduate, but what isn't.
Why not require that students take a class on the Heimlich maneuver, CPR or self-defense? How about a class on putting out different kinds of fires? You know, useful stuff.
UW should be ashamed that when I graduate, I will be able to identify a chunk of quartz sandstone (physical science requirement) when I run it over with my car, but I won't be able to change the flat tire it causes in under three hours.
Don't get me wrong-I'm not one of those business school-types who doubts the value of being a renaissance person. A lot of the classes I took changed my life, especially the ones that helped me figure out in what I wanted to do with my future.
But I really would have appreciated it if UW had found a way to make my required classes more useful to me. It would have been nice to have a few more classes that help me jump life's little but not insignificant hurdles.
Maybe it's the Thoreau talking, but I cannot help but think I would have been better served by not going to my required classes, but just sitting by the lake, reading up on how to cook, sew and change my own oil.
