POLL RESULTS: SF in School
By John DeNardo |
Monday, March 6th, 2006 at
12:00 am
Here are the results of the latest SF Signal poll.
QUESTION
Have you ever taken a science-fiction-related school course?
RESULTS
| (46 total votes) |
Be sure to vote in this week’s poll on Hollywood Adaptations!
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I wasn’t sure how to answer. I never got into the Science Fiction English class offered at my college – the University of Missouri – Rolla. It was only offered every 1 – 2 years, and it was very popular. You had to have a lot of credits to be a student with early registration time to get in. I did take Utopian Literature course. We read Gulliver’s Travels, Brave New World, 1984, The Handmaiden’s Tale, Children of Men, and maybe some others, so I did get a selection of SF in the class. It was fun.
The only Sci-fi class I ever attended in college was “History of Philosophy.” :O
I did take a class in high school, but it focused more on the works of Ray Bradbury. This is not saying its a bad thing, but that was mostly what we were reading. I enjoyed that class, but the teacher’s perspective was that SF was a setting to tell a story – preferably something current.
I think kids would enjoy a change of pace given that the cirriculum is pretty static in that kids today are still reading books we read, and we know what those are. Don’t get me wrong they are classics, but somtimes a semester or two of something different might keep them interested in school and in reading in general.
I took a cool class called “genres of literature”. The semester I took it it focused on SF, and horror classics like Dracula and Frankenstein. Actually, the class was sort of a remedial literature class, for the underacheivers of the school (of which I was not), taught by the slightly inebriated teacher that would send one of the students out to bring him back barbecued ribs during class….
I was a junior, and accidentally got signed up for a 3-hour senior-level class, and had to pick 3 electives FAST on the first day of school that year, and this one sounded interesting.
I was in a Science Fiction Literature class at Seattle University. We read I, Robot, The Left Hand of Darkness, Wild Seed, Zelazny’s Lord of Light, Neuromancer, and selections from James Gunn’s excellent anthology, The Road to Science Fiction.
If anyone is interested, there is a program entitled “Science and Science Fiction” at the University of Glamorgan in Wales, and a graduate program in Science Fiction Literature at the University of Liverpool.