<p>what are the humanities courses like? do they focus on understanding content or analyazing language. are they more along the lines of a philosophy class or a literature class?</p>
<p>You may want to start here: <a href=“http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/pdf_09/HUMA.pdf[/url]”>http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/pdf_09/HUMA.pdf</a></p>
<p>so you have to take a 3 quarter sequence of humanities writing, and a 2-3 quarter sequence course?</p>
<p>My understanding (until the actual students show up), is that your writing seminar is essentially part of your Hum course, so you take it for two or three quarters depending on how many quarters of Hum you take. I don’t think it is graded. It has a separate teacher from the Hum section, but obviously the two work together. The writing teachers are probably all grad students, and only some of the Hum sections are taught by grad students.</p>
<p>Both of my kids thought the writing seminar was valuable. One of them thought it was really, really, really valuable.</p>
<p>You don’t get credit for the writing seminars - they are basically graded components of your HUM class. They only put it down in the guide as a way to remind you that attendance and so forth is the rule, and that it will take up additional class time outside of your normal sequence. Mine was 90 minutes or so once a week, insidiously placed by our professor on Friday starting at 6 PM. Upside is our class started going to 7 PM movies together downtown. </p>
<p>At any rate, the seminars are taught by graduate students versus HUM courses mostly being taught by professors, and further have a clear humanities slant in terms of the writing style expected (based on close reading, laden with academic buzz words, deconstructionist, etcetera). The main purpose they serve is to tear apart your papers, usually accompanied by a many a B at first, in order to show you that you are nothing compared to the intellectual behemoth that is the Ivory Tower of UChicago Humanities. It also frees up professors from having to read the worthless ink droppings produced by first years (they usually just pick up a few assignments to get a sense of their TAs grade distribution). In many ways, I think the seminars are not so much meant to teach you about writing as such, but about the academic expectations of the school (late papers are usually penalized, A grades are reserved for stellar work, you cannot just reiterate trite ideas and expect to do well even if the text is canonical, advanced sentence structure and diction is required to be considered sufficiently intellectual, and so on).</p>
<p>^^^so is that why my kid uses big words, layers of meaning, and puns in casual conversation now more than ever?</p>
<p>Yes. But just wait until he starts making obscure references to Dostoyevsky or Homer at dinner parties.</p>
<p>UChicagoalum, I am with you about the writing seminars, except for the part about the professors not bothering reading what the TA has written. I had a hotshot professor for my winter quarter of hum and I got a C on my first assignment with a page worth of comments and a “see me” attached. I think all of the teachers I had were committed to making me the best student they could make me, and the shortcomings came on the parts of students who didn’t want to go to extra office hours rather than the professors who decided we weren’t worth their time.</p>
<p>It’s also worth pointing out that for grad students, tutoring in the Core Writing program: teaching their own class::summer after junior year internship:investment banking.</p>
<p>My prof kind of cycled through the papers, but then again, he had a heavy teaching load for the two quarters I took him and was famous / emeritus. </p>
<p>My TA was solid, and actually went on to a good tenure track position herself.</p>
<p>so the classes are more like english classses than philosophy classes, focused on analysis of language/close reads opposed to debate about ideas</p>
<p>No, the writing seminars are more like English classes than philosophy classes. No one has said anything about the humanities classes proper.</p>
<p>Humanities core is a grab-bag, and what you end up reading and what sequence you take will in a large sense dictate how you read the texts. For example, if you take PhilPer (Philosophical Perspectives in Humanities), you might read the Iliad and write a paper on the concept of death, justice, or friendship as indicated by the text. If you take Readings in World Lit and read the Iliad as part of the “epic” quarter, you might compare content or themes to other epics. If you take Media Aesthetics, you might find yourself comparing Poe to rap music. Or something.</p>
<p>Humanities covers such a broad range, and no one course and no one teacher approaches their subject quite the same way.</p>
<p>The writing seminars are almost a mini-class… you’ll meet maybe three times throughout the quarter to work specifically on paper-writing. These seminars are valuable… the writing TA will introduce (or re-introduce) concepts like index position, warrant, and introductions/conclusions. You may also find yourself reading and workshopping your peers’ papers.</p>
<p>There’s another writing-workshop course called The Little Red Schoolhouse, which (I believe) is for undergrads and grads who want more paper-writing know-how.</p>
<p>goankit, I think if you read the descriptions of the Humanities courses in the course catalog you can get a pretty good idea of where each of them stands on a literature-philosophy-anthropology spectrum. None of them is pure anything, and many of the texts studied are common to all or most, but it’s clear there are real differences in focus and emphasis between, say, Media Aesthetics and Philosphical Perspectives or Greek Thought. The other thing you should probably consider is that at the university level philosophy and literature tend to converge. A lot. “Analyzing language” and “analyzing content” are not opposite poles of anything.</p>