The Stampede

So this semester, at the request/suggestion of the people who bring USC freshmen the Freshman Seminars, KC Cole and I started a new course. Turned out we were brought in to replace another professor who was originally billed to do what looks to be an Art appreciation course. Looked good. The title was “The Art of Seeing and the Seeing of Art”. For whatever reason, that professor was no longer doing it, and relatively late in the day we were asked if we wanted to do a seminar, and it would be one of two freshman seminars that meets from 2:00-3:50 (or so) each Wednesday afternoon and deliberately engages with the events of the Visions and Voices programme. (See earlier blog post about that programme.)

Well, of course KC and I thought that we’d have fun with this, by mixing art and science and… everything else together. So we changed the title to “The Art and Science of Seeing, and the Seeing and Science of Art”. Heh.

The first meeting of the course, we had nine students registered, and five or six showed up. Yay! (These seminars are designed to enable freshmen to engage with all sorts of extra material, learn to take part in wide ranging discussions with their peers and a professor or two in a non-confrontational environment, and enrich their first year -some titles (more here): “You Can’t Go Home Again: Now What?”, “Bioterrorism and Emerging Diseases: Their Impact on Society”, “Beer and Belly Rings: Facts and Fictions About Today”s Youth”, “The Art of the Comic Book: Graphic Narratives from Maus to Sin City” (Blast! Why can’t I do that one?!)- are capped at 18 students in order to maintain intimacy of the discussions and discourse, etc….. lovely idea).

Then we handed out the syllabus. The word “science” was spotted. Faces fell. We tried to explain why they should not be scared, why this will be a great opportunity for them to see connections betweentheir interests in art and subjects and themes in science, and how it engages with society and popular culture… etc, etc. You know, the stuff I talk about a lot here, and that is exemplified in the Categorically Not! series I’ve mentioned before. We are going to do everything from discussing the “Uncertainty” events (a report is here), some of the other events in the series, visit some local exhibitions in the city (e.g., the wonderful “Museum of Jurassic Technology”, and of course MOCA), read the play “Copenhagen”, by Michael Frayn, and maybe even listen to Beethoven and Mingus and Ellington, and find some fun things in there too.

The second meeting of the course….. two students showed up. Seems that there was essentially a stampede created because we added the word “science” to the title. Lots of the students had signed up based on the earlier course description, and so they thought we were just going to be saying nice things about paintings. Nobody ever saw the real course description. Well, yes we are going to say things about paintings, but we are going to challenge ourselves to see a lot more… to engage with a huge range of ideas, and not artificially exclude science from the conversation because it is scary. Science will be right up front, but you don’t need to know any in order to take part.

This week, another student dropped out (she loves science but felt she did not have enough time), but luckily, we have a music student show up who did not come last week as he was away at camp, and so we still have two students. But we are hanging on by our fingernails. I’m pretty sure that if only students knew about this course, we’d get more takers, but it was never advertised…

So, if you’re at USC and you are either a freshman, or know a freshman who wants to take a two-credit pass/fail course where you challenge yourself to think creatively and just chat for a couple of hours a week, go to some events on campus and around town, read a bit, and maybe write a short paper on some of the points of discussion…… get in touch (or tell them to get in touch) really soon. This coming Friday is the last add/drop day, and so there’s some urgency here.

Spread the word.

-cvj