Registering for semester courses is never a walk in the park. Choosing electives can be difficult with the overwhelming number of possibilities. When flipping through the course catalog you’re bound to come across some strange course names that will elicit a chuckle -- but don’t be fooled. These offbeat options are often challenging, interesting, and fun. Here are a few worth checking out.

Evolution of a Habitable World

Are you curious to know what makes life on Earth possible? This class examines the history of Earth’s creation, predicts its future by comparing it to other planets in the solar system, and seeks explanations for Earth’s unique ability to sustain human life. “If life on Earth started so early, why not on Mars and Venus?” postulates Professor Beth Ellen Clark Joseph. “What is required for life?”

A major focus of the course is global warming. The class evaluates Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, and studies the limited resources of the planet, the science of climate change, and models for mapping Earth’s future. The course is intended to raise many questions about these important topics.+

Haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth? Watch the trailer:

Outdoor Adventure Skills

This class teaches students adaptive wilderness skills, which are basic skills anyone can use when camping.

Taught according to the guidelines of the Wilderness Education Association, lessons include backpacking fundamentals such as trip preparation, cooking techniques, compass and map reading, and safety considerations. Students also learn skills in a variety of temperatures and terrains, such as flat-water canoeing, cross-country skiing, and snowshoeing.

“The hope is that students can create their own small outdoor adventures,” says instructor Chris Pelchat. “They also gain a greater appreciation of the natural world and understand current issues of land use.”

Cultivating Meditative Awareness

If you’re looking to de-stress and gain a greater sense of self, check out this class.

Held in Muller Chapel, this class teaches simple and useful meditation techniques through sitting and walking. Michael Faber, Jewish chaplain and director of Muller Chapel, created the course and has taught it for nine semesters in a pragmatic, nonreligious way so all students can benefit. “It’s not about accepting or rejecting certain beliefs,” Faber says. “It’s about how to observe and take care of one’s own mind.”

Environmental studies major Nicole Stumpf ’08 took the class during her sophomore year. “I really enjoyed it because for an hour twice a week I’d be forced to calm down,” she explains.

Faber said the course also has practical applications for students, such as focusing attention, lowering stress levels, and gaining greater clarity of thoughts and emotions.

Writing Children’s Literature

Though the course title sounds simple, this class is definitely not child’s play.

Students read classic and contemporary works of children’s literature, including fairy tales and myths, then analyze them for style and content.

Professor Katharyn Machan created the class in the late 1970s because she believed that children’s literature was largely ignored in mainstream media despite its power to influence social change.

“It’s political in the broadest sense of getting readers to look at the world and the choices they make for the things they do,” she explains. “It is the most important political work we do.”

Josh Elmer ’09, a cinema and photography major, took the class because he enjoys writing science fiction and found this class a “freeing” experience that expanded his writing abilities.

“We’re understanding that children’s literature is an art form,” comments Elmer. “It is literature, and it should not be ignored.”

The Good Life

What does it mean to “live the good life”? Philosophy professor Frederik Kaufman asks this in his class of the same name. From day one students explore what it means to live a good life and asking brain-busting questions like, is judging a life to be good sufficient for it to be good, or is this the sort of thing one can get wrong?

The class explores ancient thinkers such as Plato, classic thinkers like Nietzsche, and contemporary thinkers who have sought the answers to these important questions for hundreds of years.

“I can think of no course that is more important for a reflective and intellectually curious person to take,” says Kaufman. “What is more important than reading what great thinkers have said about a worthwhile human existence?”

Every IC student is encouraged to step outside the classes in his or her major and broaden their academic interests. Can you think of a more fun way than to sample one of these classes? Who knows -- you may just discover a love of the unusual.

American Breakdown: The Literature of Madness and Mental Instability in America

Are you mad? American Breakdown, a class offered by the English department, explores the Jekyll and Hyde nature of American literature.

“American literature is often defined in terms of its split-personality,” says Professor Hugh Egan. “We look at individual stories of psychic breakdown or mental instability and contextualize these in terms of a larger American narrative that attempts to fuse radically divergent impulses.”

The class reads One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Girl, Interrupted among other works by Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Toni Morrison, and they study the themes of Puritanism, race, and gender throughout these narratives.

Introduction to Gardens

Got a green thumb? Introduction to Gardens is an art history class in which students study gardens for their aesthetic, practical, and historical value. Beginning with ancient gardens and looking at Italian villas, French Baroque and eastern gardens, English landscapes, romantic gardens, colonial gardens, and modern and postmodern gardens, the class focuses on these gardens that Mari Mitchell, the instructor for the class, has studied and visited.

“We cover all the famous gardens throughout the world,” Mitchell says. Each lecture is filled with images and clips from movies featuring garden scenes, and the class takes several trips to local gardens.

Mitchell, who has taught the course since spring 2002, believes the gardens they study make great travel destinations for students too. “I always have students who go away to Europe for spring or summer break and go to see what we studied in class.”

The course requires no “digging,” because it is an introductory course, but Mitchell says it is visually jam packed and sure to pique students’ curiosities in gardens.