Learning, But Not by the Book

Some college courses never seem to go away -- the venerable "history of math," for example. But schools do try to keep up with the times by overhauling the content, looking for a unique resource, or inventing entirely new ones that sometimes combine approaches from different disciplines.

Some schools have long taught politics or sociology by looking through the prism of popular music -- The Beatles and Bruce Springsteen, for example -- but today Hip-Hop is employed. Many college students learn about the Watergate scandal but only those at the University of Texas at Austin can easily avail themselves of the newly purchased papers of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. And there are a range of new courses created since the 9/11 attacks dealing with national security issues.

Colorado College, Colorado Springs

Nabokov's Butterflies

Course combines comparative literature and biology, examining the intersections between Vladimir Nabokov's work as a lepidopterist and a writer. A highlight: A weeklong field trip in which students retrace one of Nabokov's own butterfly-hunting expeditions in the Southwest and catch butterflies; given that Nabokov wrote Lolita during such an expedition, students read Lolita along the way.