But, I am le tired

In AskBwog, we tackle hard hitting issues facing American teens today.

Dear Bwog editors,

Class registration for Fall 2012 is fast-approaching (scary!), and I need to take a global core class. I’m writing you for help picking a class, and also because I’m sure many other CC students would appreciate Bwog’s input as well. I want a class that’s not super demanding, but I’m not necessarily looking for just an easy A. I understand that the point of the Global Core is to expose students to interesting things they would not otherwise study, and I want to take something interesting! Do you have any suggestions for a good global core class, ideally with an awesome professor, being offered in fall 2012?

Thanks for your help!

Globally Off-Centered

Dear Globally,

We all go through the Global Core, some more gracefully than others. It’s like puberty that way. Here are some suggestions. Readers and dissidents, pipe up.

Happy registering,

Bwog

Yeas:

  • Stathis Gourgouris’s World Responds to the Greeks is “amazing.” Examining “post-colonial African, Caribbean and South American Lit that reworks Ancient Greek tragedies and epics,” the course is taught by Gourgouris who knows “everything about any liberal intellectual literary or philosophical movement ever.”
  • Wael Hallaq’s Colloquium on Islamic Texts is “magical.” It’s a weekly seminar where there “are no tests;” only two papers about anything you want. He is a specialist of Sharia and takes you from the Qur’an to an essay by Bin Laden, and ties everything he teaches back to the onset of modernity and the enlightenment thinkers, in order to morally evaluate their roles in capitalism and nationalism.  He’s also pretty well-published.
  • Islam is “great,” but “it is not an ‘easy’ A.”
  • The Rise of Civilization (duh)
  • Mahmood Mamdani’s Major Debates in the Study of Africa
  • Intro to Comparative Ethnic Studies
  • Gregory Pflugfelder’s  Cultural History of Japanese Monsters; it’s “really popular and hard to get into,” perhaps because “you get to analyze Pokémon.”
  • Michael Como’s Intro to East Asian Buddhism

Nays:

  • Rashid Khalidi’s History of the Modern Middle East, which is “scattered and too much of a survey for me to really feel like I came out of it with something.” Your grade is based upon two papers in which “you must regurgitate the arguments of the lectures and selected texts.”
Globe, get it?  via Wikimedia Commons