Yes it’s a shame engineering majors don’t get the opportunity to spread their wings to liberal arts. It takes gobjillion units to get an engineering degree (that’s a precise number, I’m an engineer) and a minimum of five years. You are just too tired to take a class that takes up mind space in another field.

Back in my humanities days my major was so low-unit I had to take a ton of other classes just to meet the minimum units for graduation. So I ended up taking classes on lit, history, and music. And they were fantastic and I learned a lot and expanded my world. But not everyone has that kind of time/money to be taking a whole lot of extra classes. It’s a shame we can’t expand those kinds of undergrad classes to a lifetime learning thing because sometimes I miss taking those classes and wish I could drop in at the university and audit a few just for personal learning. So my colleagues may not know who Chaucer is but they’ll still be good engineers.

Some of my favorite professors were in my humanities discipline of study (so useless it hasn’t even been mentioned here) who instructed us on how to buy a diversified stock portfolio while we were still young and could benefit from compound interest or others who warned us against credit card debt and other kinds of debt. Not related to my study, but I liked the “real world” advice.

On a totally unrelated note, I recently discovered your blog and love it. I have also passed it around to some of my grad school colleagues.

I think you’re right about history teaching people how to read and to evaluate/analyze information. (If the students take advantage of the opportunity, that is.)

What an undergraduate degree should be about is learning to think and how to learn the next thing that you need to know to be successful. The history professor and his wife that taught me history also taught me to learn on my own, how to evaluate information (historical or business), and to think for myself. I have thanked them many times for this.

So when someone says how can history help you in real life, it is not just the concrete things that one learns. Life is not a single event event, but a long journey.

At my parents’ house, the outside decorations may go up the day after Thanksgiving, if the weather is nice and the timing works out around the college football games.

Otherwise, everything goes up, inside and outside, on December 7 – which is their wedding anniversary. Yeah, they got married on Pearl Harbor Day…which even they find hilarious.

Having said that I believe that one can do large courses without TAs, even history classes. My current institution has decided that to preserve our sanity the survey courses will have multiple sections, one of which will be capped at 280, the others at 40. The professors rotate teaching the one supersection (which means we each teach it once every 6 semesters). This also means that instead of a 4-4 we have a 3-3. The students who like the big lecture courses can take the supersection, and those that like the smaller courses can still do so. Teaching it is a bit of a challenge, but a fun challenge.