“Who doesn’t want to sit in a classroom and watch movie and television clips while reading a novel that has captured the world?” asks an Ohio State University student. She’s beaming about a class which asks her to read only four novels, all of them Harry Potters. Otherwise, it’s sit back and watch tv.
Another student agrees: “You are only in college for four years…. You should take classes that are fun, not that just meet a requirement.”
Of course, you could play this another way. You’re only in college for four years, so why not learn something?
To be sure, the Potter course fulfills a major requirement. UD wonders about the discussion among members of the English department’s curriculum committee in which the decision was made that reading four children’s books satisfies a literature requirement at a university.
The professor’s statement to the newspaper about her course is hard to understand: “I’m hoping for students to look at the books from as many different angles as they wouldn’t have otherwise.”
May 13th, 2008 at 11:37AM
Hmmm…I think your anti-popular media bias is showing.
May 13th, 2008 at 12:08PM
I’m a huge Harry Potter fan. I got the books at midnight, have both the American and British versions, have certain passages memorized, etc.
That said, four books at a pre-collegiate reading level and a bunch of TV clips do not a class make.
The differences between the American and British versions are miniscule ("trainers" vs. "sneakers", for example) and by the 4th or 5th book, they stopped Americanizing the language anyway.
Lots of people will read Harry Potter outside of class anyway. The same is not true of most other college literature. College is supposed to expose you to things you otherwise wouldn’t encounter. This isn’t anti-popular media, this is anti-laziness.
May 13th, 2008 at 1:04PM
Ironically, it is through Harry Potter that many of today’s undergraduates have been introduced to the residential college idea and have gained a better understanding of it than most senior faculty and administrators.
May 13th, 2008 at 2:45PM
Phew. Kansas State’s Harry Potter course has twelve books on the syllabus, including Pullman’s His Dark Materials (I’m a big fan).
May 13th, 2008 at 3:08PM
Did everyone else miss the reference to a "course reader"?
I presume some academic-y goodness would be contained therein.
I could as easily be wrong as right, but to presume academic turpitude without a full syllabus isn’t very collegial, and it’s rather unfair.
That said, I never quite understood the logic of entire courses focused on one text [or, in this case, a serial text]. I mean, other than The Decameron or The Canterbury Tales, isn’t this a bit too narrowly focused?
May 13th, 2008 at 10:10PM
The_Myth: I agree with you; but that elicits fond memories of a course description that frequently appeared in the JHU catalog:
"James Joyce’s Ulysses. The novel of the century. We will read it."
(Hugh Kenner, natch).