![<p>“There’s something just really fun and beautiful to be in a drum circle in [Old] Cabell Hall in the middle of the week,” Jospe said.</p>](https://snworksceo.imgix.net/cav/ccbadcd5-adb7-47c0-8752-3ef904b18a88.sized-1000x1000.jpg?w=1000)
As over-zealous, soon-to-be first-years fill Grounds during Days on the Lawn season, many are likely thinking about what classes they have to take to take to fill requirements for a major they may soon change. However, students have a variety of motivations for how they should fill their schedules. A need for certain introductory courses or major requirements can lead to overcrowded lecture halls and content students may not necessarily be interested in, but feel they should know.
“In your first year and your second year, you have a lot of time in huge lecture classes and you’re just a number or a face in the room,” Assoc. Religious Studies Prof. John Portmann said. “Some people like that — if they don’t speak up or miss class, nobody knows. But there’s other students who want to speak up and think on their feet and defend their positions.”
Portmann teaches a Religious Studies class at the University called “In Defense of Sin,” conceptualized his book with the same name, published in 2003.
“When I taught it the first year, I didn’t really know what to expect,” Portmann said. “I thought it was going to be a one-time deal.”
Portmann’s class is now a continual, 25-person class that reaches full enrollment within 24 hours of opening. In addition to the book that inspired the class, Portmann has since published a number of other titles, such as “A History of Sin” and “Catholic Culture in the USA: In and Out of Church.”
“I grew up in a pretty strict Catholic family, so I heard a lot about sin from nuns, from priests and [from] my parents,” Portmann said.
In-class discussions focus on biblical, philosophical and non-religious readings, and a fifth of students’ grades are from participation. Questions are very opinion-based.
“I think [sin is] really complicated. It’s negative because it’s made so many people feel guilty about so much — about telling little white lies,” Portmann said. “At the same time, life is really, really scary because it’s so hard to make sense of, but sin is kind of like a light that guides people and makes everyday life experience easier to understand.”
For those interested in a broad understanding of business, David Touve, assistant professor and director of the Galant Center for Entrepreneurship, teaches “Start-up: An Introduction to Entrepreneurship,” in which many of the topics correlate to specific classes at the University. The class itself deals with case studies and practice-oriented workshops.
“I think students in general are just interested in what start-ups are and whatever entrepreneurship is,” Touve said. “I don’t know what entrepreneurship is, but I do have experience knowing what it takes to start a start-up.”
Touve said the case studies students work on are relatively similar to what a startup is actually like, because as students work through them, they are at first unfamiliar with the material and tentative to participate but eventually gain confidence.
Gabriel Finder, associate professor and director of Jewish Studies, also said he thinks his students appreciate that his course is not entirely lecture-based. Finder teaches a German in Translation and European History cross-listed course called “The Holocaust.” Class discussions here also often lack a right answer.
“This question is an internal question — what would I have done? Would I have compromised my values in some way?” Finder said.
The class tackles questions such as what students would have done if they were living in this time period, why Germans and their accomplices threw their values to the wind and if Jews were able to see signs of what was about to happen, why more did not leave.
Finder is the child and grandchild of Holocaust survivors and the first of his family born in the United States.
“I’m a scholar and I’m objective but I’m also very, very close to the subject,” Finder said. “I do my best to try to balance my passion with all of the knowledge.”
Finder said it is important for people to learn about the Holocaust and genocide because, however unfortunate, they were part of the fabric of the 20th century.
“I would hope that by learning about the Holocaust and these atrocities all of us can just become more responsible global citizens,” Finder said. “I really hope that this is a class where one looks deeply into the human soul and understands how people act in extreme conditions.”
To better understand decisions, the Lifetime Physical Activity Program includes classes such as “Introduction to Mindfulness” that do just that. The class is taught this semester by graduate student and Curry School instructor Lynne Crotts.
“I learned about it probably five years ago, but I realized I’d probably been [practicing] since I was in the sixth grade,” Crotts said. “I didn’t know this is mindfulness.”
In her class, Crotts focuses first on breathing, because it is something that is always present. Students can then turn this attention training to being mindful about other aspects of their life and decisions they make. In particular, Crotts stressed the importance of concentrating on one activity at a time due to the increased productivity that can come from this focus.
“The goal is not to become peaceful but to develop a habit of noticing,” Crotts said.
Within other programs of the Kinesiology department, classes center on a similar theme of well-being.
“Even our ‘Dance for Fitness’ class is a mindfulness-based and meditative kind of dance class,” LPA Program Director Diane Whaley said. “I see as a big part of our mission helping students to recognize the anxiety and stress that are inherent with being a highly competitive student.”
In Whaley’s own class, “The Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity,” she starts every class with a mindfulness routine.
“It’s that idea of ‘the thoughts come in, you look at it, you don’t judge it, you let it go,’” Whaley said.
New this semester, Meditation Peer Leadership concentrates on teaching meditation and mindfulness practices to students who will go out and share what they have learned with their friends and organizations. All programs offered usually fill up within a few days of opening.
“There are very few universities where we have a program of this size where nobody has to take the classes, but constantly every single class is full with a waitlist,” Whaley said.
In the Music department, Performance Faculty member Robert Jospe teaches a two-credit course called “Learn to Groove” and starts every day with the same meditation practices in which students take a few minutes out of the start of each class to clear their heads.
“Learn to Groove” is a basic drum course, taken mainly by fourth-years with some musical experience, though not necessarily in percussion.
“There are a lot of people who have never even played drums before and just want a musical experience,” Jospe said. “I like that in a class because the whole premise of ‘Learn to Groove,’ in a way, is that nobody has to learn to groove, everyone knows how to keep a beat.”
The class is based upon a book Jospe wrote, also titled “Learn to Groove,” and has a waiting list of around 300 students.
“There’s something just really fun and beautiful to be in a drum circle in [Old] Cabell Hall in the middle of the week,” Jospe said.
Even if these courses do not always directly correlate to major requirements, professors seem to agree that either through stimulating discussion or mindful practices students can use to supplement other academic and cognitive work, they are still beneficial academically.
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