Monday, August 17, 2015

A Worthwhile Class, or Not?

I've heard of worse ones:
The latest chatter about Game of Thrones is whether Jon Snow, a favorite character of the critically acclaimed and controversial HBO fantasy series, was really bumped off at the end of last season, or if he might somehow live again, join the ranks of zombies or merge his soul with that of Ghost, his albino dire wolf sidekick, of sorts.

Students at the University of California, Berkeley, can’t get caught up in all that right now. They’re busy looking back on what went into the show’s five seasons of intense plotting, intrigue and mayhem that culminated with Snow’s (apparent) death.

Summer Session courses such as this one, says instructor Justin Vaccaro, draw students with their seemingly light fare and their subjects’ hit status. And he’s got 27 students, a record for any of the summer classes he has taught since 2011.
Doesn't sound impressive yet, until you get to this part of the article:
For six weeks, shades are drawn and lights dimmed as students explore questions about what Game of Thrones may be saying about democracy, climate change, comparisons or contrasts of medieval battles and today’s warfare and torture, corruption of the American Dream, global havoc, and how human bodies – especially those of women, the disabled or poor – both possess, and yield to, power.  link
If done well this could be an exceptional course.

1 comment:

maxutils said...

I can't speak to this course in particular … but a former student whom we both had, I believe, went to Cal … and took a similar film study class featuring the Coen Bros films … and it turned out to be one of the pillars of he MA thesis. So, yeah … absolutely it can be done right. Less impressed with the source material … but that's just me.