Hell's Curriculum

[pauraque_bk]

Oh, I think this, originated by laurelwood, should be a meme. What would your curriculum in hell look like?

Period 1: HISTORY- Wars Reduced Only To Dates of Battles and Maps of Troop Movements
Period 2: LANGUAGE ARTS- Books the Teacher Doesn't Understand
Period 3: ART- Modern Art Theory and Appreciation
Period 4: P.E.- Every Team Sport Ever Devised
Period 5: SCIENCE- Memorizing Facts about the Periodic Table
Period 6: MATH- Things With No Practical Applications Outside Advanced Physics

I couldn't come up with an actual art activity I would hate to do, but then I thought of all those horrible paintings at SFMOMA and how painful it would be to try to "understand" a series of 26 paintings of a red line (I am not making this up)... so yeah.

Comments

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

Here's mine (cribbing just a little from yours, because yeah):

Period 1: HISTORY- Wars Reduced Only To Dates of Battles and Maps of Troop Movements
Period 2: LANGUAGE ARTS- Novels Analyzed Page by Page
Period 3: ART- Deep Symbolism in Abstract Art
Period 4: P.E.- Endless Lap Running in "Loaner" Gym Clothes
Period 5: SCIENCE- Organic Chemistry (Lecture-Only Course)
Period 6: MATH- Applications of Integral Calculus

[pauraque]

Everyone seems to hate running laps, but that never bothered me so much. At least when you run you can do it by yourself... unless it's a relay. :P

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

I can't breathe when I run. Laps were always a nightmare.

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

And team sports weren't so bad because no one really expected me to do much.

[pauraque]

Breathing is fairly important! I'm pretty uncoordinated and self-conscious, so team sports made me an emo kid.

[bardsmaid.livejournal.com]

And then there's the foreign language class where you memorize inane dialogs full of conversational bits you'd never use in RL... or that make no sense within the target culture. (Yes, this very thing drove me to write my own undergrad Spanish text as a grad student. It was my Masters project.)

[pauraque]

Cool! That kind of thing is actually why I stopped taking French. In the earlier grades I had a teacher with near native fluency who could point out problems in the books, like things no French person would actually say. The teacher for the older kids was a lot less clueful, and would just go along with texts that even I knew were problematic.

[bardsmaid.livejournal.com]

I did this after living in Madrid for a year (and also after being very impressed with a French text I had in college where everything included was real, useful info about living in Paris. My goal was that if you used my book and were then somehow parachuted into Spain, you'd be able to actually function.

[pauraque]

It's funny, in material about little-known languages, linguists usually prefer to use for their examples things that native speakers spontaneously said in normal conversation. They only use non-spontaneous or made up sentences when there's no other choice. I wish similar standards were applied to well known languages when they're taught.

[wootsauce.livejournal.com]

I had to take a year (series of 3 classes) of modernism. ....It was on friday mornings and I was always really sleepy, but it was interesting. I think my hell art class would be akin to the young artists program we had in my elementary school, aka "brief nonsensical intro about a famous work of art and then some formulaic, thematically-related art project on the level of macaroni pictures."

I think I would also amend PE to "never stop running"

[pauraque]

brief nonsensical intro about a famous work of art and then some formulaic, thematically-related art project on the level of macaroni pictures

I had this, but the scary thing is it was in high school. I think macaroni was actually involved. I definitely remember the vague blah blah about something historical, and then gluing yarn onto something or other.

[wootsauce.livejournal.com]

I remember we did one where we put paint on an actual fish and then pressed paper against it to make some sort of fishy print. WTF. At least in my high school art class when I was done with the structured stuff I could do whatever I wanted, that elementary school stuff was just so disappointing in every way.

[pauraque]

Aaaaaaaah. No fishy prints plzkthx.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_hannelore/]

Period 1: SPEECHING - Say "Mellifluous" in Front of the Class
Period 2: MATH - Everything Beyond 1 + 2
Period 3: P.E. - Aerobics (we really had to do this :| )
Period 4: GEOGRAPHY - Islands, Such as Alaska
Period 5: SOCIAL STUDIES - Boring Dudes the Teacher Finds Extremely Fascinating

[pauraque]

We had to do aerobics in middle school. This was actually one of the only PE activities that made me feel healthier instead of just traumatized. I could run a lot more laps without getting tired after we'd been forced to Sweat To The Oldies for a while.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_hannelore/]

You mean Sweating to Duran Duran? :P

I suppose it traumatized me more because for some reason our teacher concluded girls were going to do aerobics while the boys played floor hockey. Boy, was I pissed!

[pauraque]

I don't remember if it was segregated. Though I do remember my mom commenting that when she was a bebe, the girls had to do these upper body exercises and chant "we must, we must, we must develop our bust".