February 7th, 2008
Every once in a while you come across one of those truly bizarre university courses that are usually borne of the kind of open-mindedness and accepting naivety that can only be found in the secluded warm fuzzy confines of an arts department at a university. You know the kind of thing I'm talking about: "Techno-Sex and Cyborg Babies" or "Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Film and Video" or "Ultimate Frisbee". These are real examples I pulled off of the Internet, by the way.
The idea for these courses must rise from a combination of boredom, urges to "do something different", and a wide-eyed conviction that "It could happen ... there must be room for it somewhere." There's a U-shaped arch that describes how these things go from inception to execution that follows the amount of thinking about the possibility, as shown in Figure 1:
So, as we can see, it is possible to overthink something into completion, instead of letting the idea bounce around inside some heads for a while before melting away into the ocean of ideas without legs to crawl onto dry ground by themselves.
And such was the case for the very first offering of a course that I took at Simon Fraser University back in 1991 called, "Hockey in Canada". I was an undergrad looking for something different and unusual and exotic and ... well, kinda wankerish, actually, to suit my mood at the time. I mean, I wanted more than anything to figure out what direction my scattered and eclectic university career should take. This seemed like it might open up new vistas ... or at least make it look like I was opening up new vistas. As far as the underlying impetus and interest in the course content itself ... well, I was always smart enough, but never that kind of intensely sharply intellectually clever enough to be an academic. Back then I thought academics were the smart ones and I was an idiot, but that opinion has changed somewhat over time.
And, no, I am not disparaging academics here. Well, not a lot, anyhow. The instructor, a former gymnast, took herself and her course very seriously. She kind of had to, since if anyone stopped to think about it a little (operating words here: "a little") they would realise how ultimately silly this course really was--whether one wanted to call it a sociology or anthropology course or not. And so she fought to keep the zany folks from presenting opinions, she resisted the Lunatic Fringe (which seemed to be attracted to this course ... gee, I wonder why?) and its attempts to turn this course into a mutual hate-fest against organized hockey and money-mongering that professional sports have become.
She was, in short, trying to impart on that course a sense of respectability that other, much more -er- accepted courses had: She wanted her course to be mentioned in the same breath as the Physics of sub-atomic particles, or Chaucer, or the History of Byzantium, or a study of Baroque counterpoint. And showing home movies of you and your buddies playing street hockey, or standing up and foaming at the mouth about Wayne Gretzky "selling out" by moving to Los Angeles were counter to that image that the course wanted to project.
It was still offered as of 2007, by the way, so it must have succeeded in putting on airs.
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