While freshman Tyese Beauharnais holds out a hoop, one of her classmates springs off a trampoline, gracefully dives through its center and flips onto a mat below.

Nearby, other classmates spin plates on sticks, practice elaborate magic tricks and master balancing poses. Meanwhile, their professor is busy teaching another student a complex tandem juggling act.

Beauharnais, a nursing major, admits she gets a lot of skeptical looks when she explains to her friends and family that she runs off to join the circus two days a week as part of her college course work.

"They think I’m crazy. But I get four credits for it," said Beauharnais, 18, of East Rutherford.

Yes, "Circus Arts" is a real academic class at Bloomfield College, a private four-year school in Essex County. The popular elective course, which is offered to undergraduates of all majors, teaches students the basics of circus life — from tightrope walking to juggling to riding a unicycle. While it looks like silly fun, professors say the graded class teaches students important lessons about teamwork, conquering fear and overcoming obstacles.

The class is one of dozens of unorthodox, unusual and downright quirky courses popping up on college campuses around New Jersey. Most spring from the minds of creative professors and students trying to find ways to spice up staid topics with references to pop culture or unusual twists. But the classes can also be a marketing ploy, something to set a college apart and show off to parents and prospective students when they take campus tours.

There’s "'South Park' and Philosophy" at Monmouth University, "Gender, Sexuality, and Pop Music in the 1980s" at the College of New Jersey, "The Harry Potter Phenomenon" at Rowan University and "History of Hip Hop and Rap" at Ramapo College. Rutgers University offers "Wine Insights," an introduction to wine-tasting class, and Fairleigh Dickinson University has "The Psychology of Fine Dining," which includes a "food sampling" lab.

Several local colleges, including Centenary in Hackettstown, have begun challenging professors to come up with unusual classes to offer as seminars to incoming freshmen. In recent years, Centenary students have gotten credit for courses on "The Simpsons," cults, reality television and the computer game "SimCity."

School officials dismiss criticism that the classes are a waste of students’ time or tuition money. Though the topics may be unusual, the freshman seminars are designed to teach time management, college-level writing and other key skills.

"It might have some interesting hook, but even if it doesn't, it gets the job done," said Cheryl Veronda, director of academic transitions at Centenary College.



Not without critics

While the growing number of unusual classes are popular with students, some academics worry they are a sign American college courses are getting too easy while schools in the rest of the world are becoming more rigorous.

In their new book, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses," New York University professor Richard Arum and University of Virginia assistant professor Josipa Roksa tracked thousands of students at two dozen colleges and universities. They found most students are not challenged in their classes and few showed significant improvements in critical thinking, complex reasoning or written communication skills after four years in college.

"They might graduate, but they are failing to develop the higher-order cognitive skills that it is widely assumed college students should master. These findings are sobering and should be a cause for concern," Arum and Roksa concluded.

So far, there have been no complaints about Centenary’s unusual courses, Veronda said.

"I’ve never heard of a complaint from parents, which is great," Veronda said. "I think they understand there’s an objective that the course has."

Here’s a look at some of the unusual classes students are taking on New Jersey campuses this semester:

• "Sociology of Salsa" at Saint Peter's College

In professor Alex Trillo’s sociology class, students don’t just learn about the culture of the salsa dancing scene. They step, kick and sway their way into it.

The course requires students to dance at salsa clubs and studios in New Jersey and New York City while gathering information for an ethnographic study on the dance culture with Latin American roots.

"It was sort of this avenue into understanding history and culture," said Trillo, an associate professor at the Jersey City Catholic college.

The class began after Trillo invited his colleagues to a performance that showed off his side passion as a semi-professional salsa dancer. The chair of the sociology department was adamant Trillo add a dance class to his list of more scholarly courses on research methods and statistics, issues in the Latino community and health and inequality.

Trillo, who is the director of the college’s Latin American and Latino Studies Program, said his challenge was: "How can I keep intellectual credibility for a class on salsa like this — that actually included dancing?"

"I wanted to make sure we had some academic grounding, link it to some other classes I teach and train them in the art of doing research," he said.

Now in its third year, the Sociology of Salsa course has become enormously popular, Trillo said. The students’ final paper is composed of field notes, personal reflections on how they evolved in this process and an interview with a dancer or studio owner.

• "Inside the Mind of a Teenage Killer" at Centenary College

In what was probably the most unusual class assignment of her freshman year, student Tiffany Gittinger used a marker to draw the face of teenage killer William Garner on one side of a Halloween pumpkin. On the other side, she drew flames to represent the fires he set in an Ohio home that killed five children.

The macabre assignment was part of the freshman’s study of Garner for her freshman seminar on teenage killers.

Christine Floether, an associate professor at Centenary College in Hackettstown, based the "Inside the Mind of a Teenage Killer" class on the book of the same name by author Phil Chalmers as a way to introduce basic concepts of psychology. The class, a requirement for freshmen majoring in the field, delves into a variety of topics including cyber bullying and drug abuse.

Despite its unusual topic, the course is also used to familiarize freshmen with college life, help them develop good study habits and teach time-management skills.

Floether asks each of her students to pick one teenage killer, research his or her crime and write a short biography.

Gittinger, 18, said she chose to research teenage arsonist Garner because "his case really made me upset." Garner lit a house on fire in 1992 after breaking in to steal electronics. Five of the six kids children inside died.

After doing her research, Gittinger said she found some sympathy for Garner, who had an IQ of 72 and claimed he didn’t intend to hurt the children. He was executed last year.

• "Fundamentals of Comedy Writing & Performing: Stand up" at William Paterson University

The final assignment in professor Stephen Rosenfield’s stand-up comedy class at William Paterson in Wayne, requires students to stand up in front of real audience at a New York City comedy club and get people to laugh.

A good stand-up comic makes being funny look effortless. But hours of work often are behind seemingly simple routines, Rosenfield said.

"There is a tremendous amount of writing, and it’s interesting because it’s very technical writing. It’s similar to iambic pentameter," Rosenfield said, referring to the Shakespearean verse.

Rosenfield started teaching at William Paterson about eight years ago after one of the university’s professors took his class at the New York City-based American Comedy Institute, where Rosenfield is the director.

In his introduction to stand-up class, Rosenfield teaches his William Paterson students to make their jokes clear and concise to reach an optimal laugh-per-minute ratio. He explains various techniques, such as the "roll," popularized on late-night comedy shows in the form of Top 10 lists. He also tells students to draw on their experiences for funny anecdotes and shows them how to develop a persona.

"We’re looking for upwards of four laughs per minute," he said. "That takes an understanding of some very specific structures of writing."

• "Habitat for Humanity" at New Jersey Institute of Technology

By their fourth year of study, NJIT’s architecture students have had plenty of chances to create buildings on papers. But building a real house for a real family is rare.

That is what students in Darius Sollohub’s class are competing to do in a course designed three years ago in partnership with Habitat for Humanity, the nonprofit group that builds houses for needy families.

Each student designs houses with construction costs under $100,000. Then, a five-person jury picks the winning project.

This fall, the class is working with Habitat for Humanity’s Paterson chapter for the first time, Sollohub said. The organization’s architect of record, Jak Inglese, comes to about one-third of the classes on the Newark campus and serves on the jury. The winning student and first runner up are given internships with his East Rutherford architectural firm to finish their designs during winter break and into the spring semester.

Ben Nicolson, an architecture student from Whitehouse Station, said he was drawn to the course because he was interested in the competitive aspect and the real-world application.

"This is the only studio where we're working with actual clients," said Nicolson, 23. "We're actually designing for them."



By Kelly Heyboer and Nic Corbett/The Star-Ledger

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