<p>As a home-schooler, I have taken (or will take) several of these, including Bioinformatics, Topology, and Game Theory. While these topics aren't weird, per se, they are pretty rare among high-school students. I took them solely because I was interested in the topics, but I'm hoping that they might help demonstrate my academic interests to prospective colleges.</p>
<p>So, what about you guys? What are the weirdest or most nontraditional classes you have taken in high school? Do you think they will help your college applications?</p>
<p>^not at religious schools. My friend attends a Christian school and students there are required to take 4 credits of religion. I guess the oddest class I have taken was AutoCAD (dual enrollment through a local-ish uni).</p>
<p>@Kitten23: That’s pretty cool. I know I did a bunch of stuff with Autodesk’s Maya in middle school, and the teacher gave us all free copies of the $3500+ software. :D</p>
<p>The OP asked a really cool question, so I’ll try to do something pretty cool back:</p>
<p>The most random/rarest course that I ever took would be Puppetry at the University of Connecticut, which was really cool since they have an exceptional puppetry department.</p>
<p>I’ve also had a course called Eastern and Western Thought, which was a pretty cool course in the philosophies of the Eurasian region, which I’d suppose most haven’t taken either.</p>
<p>@DiscipulusBonus that’s really cool! I think I can get a free/ cheap copy (the student version), but I haven’t since i don’t have a computer that will run it very well… I’m waiting to get a new laptop when I start college.</p>
<p>@Kitten23: I’m not familiar with AutoCAD, but that’s probably a good idea. Maya nearly killed my old computer, and the rendering time took forever.</p>
Were these college classes, or…? What were the prerequisites for topology?</p>
<p>The only weird high school class I took was called Novels for Young Readers, and it was basically a children’s literature class. Every day someone brought in a children’s book to read aloud. I read The Lorax and something else I can’t remember. It was a fun class.</p>
<p>The weirdest college class I’ve taken is Non-Western Philosophy. The most interesting assignment was “write an essay about the mystery of human consciousness” (with references to non-western ideas, of course, but it was less of a history class than I expected and I was glad for that because I don’t like history very much). </p>
<p>I took a really similar course to “Non-Western Philosophy”, as I mentioned earlier on. How’d you like the overall course? I enjoyed mine a lot, but it was also really bad, since I had to explain to a bunch of people that Indian people could be Caucasian, Aryan [blond hair, blue eyed] and of normal height while also breaking down some pretty bad stereotypes.</p>
<p>Also, for “Novels for Young Readers”, were you guys reading to kids, or did there really exist a courses in which high schoolers were able to read Dr.Seuss in a literature class? Did you guys have to do some convoluted analysis of the texts?</p>
<p>@halcyonheather: I’m supposedly taking topology next year through MIT OpenCourseWare. At least, we’re putting it on my transcript for next year, but I might <em>accidentally</em> finish it over the summer. The prerequisite listed on the MIT OCW website is real analysis, which I haven’t technically taken yet, but my 10th grade calculus class on AoPS was rigorous enough to prepare me for topology. So far, the psets have looked pretty simple.</p>
Non-Western in this class meant ancient China, India, and Persia in the last couple of days. Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Carvaka, Confucianism, Taoism, Mohism, Legalism, and Zoroastrianism. I liked it more than I thought I would, mostly because the lecturer was good. </p>
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We read to the rest of the class, not to little kids. In theory (i.e. according to the course description) we were supposed to be analyzing the texts, but we didn’t really. It was just reading children’s books, and then at the end of the class we wrote our own and illustrated them. </p>
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This is going on my list of problems I wish I had.</p>
<p>That sounds really cool! That’s mostly what my class covered, and being of North Indian descent, it was really cool to see how other people viewed the philosophies of my culture.</p>
<p>I don’t have any space in my schedule for weird classes since we only have 6 periods and we have to take PE for 2 years and a foreign language and a Visual or Performing Art.</p>
<p>Since my school is a sci/tech magnet school, we have a lot of non-traditional classes. I’ve taken both analog and digital electronics and am currently taking cryptography. I have friends who have taken artificial intelligence, parallel computing, and DNA science, among others.</p>
But yeah, I’m totally in love with my cryptography class.</p>