美国大学奇葩课 如何上网浪费时间

Lucky creative writing students in a University of Pennsylvania seminar will be able to earn academic credit for wasting time on the Internet next spring. The class, appropriately titled “Wasting Time on the Internet,” will require its students to spend the three-hour weekly sessions dividing their attention between the world of the Internet and the classroom.

明年春天，宾夕法尼亚大学研讨会上幸运的创意写作的学生可以从“浪费时间上网”上获得学分。这个取名为“浪费时间在网上”的班级要求，他们的学生花三个小时每周将注意力从班级里转到网络世界。

The instructor, Kenneth Goldsmith, tells The Washington Post that he will strictly enforce “a state of distraction” among the students — exactly the sort of thing he and virtually every other professor on Earth spends time trying to eliminate from their classes.

导师肯尼斯·戈德史密斯告诉《华盛顿邮报》，他会严格逼迫学生执行“分心的状态”——恰恰是那种地球上其他的教授告诫学生万万不可做的事情。

The purpose, Goldsmith says, is to have the students write something good at the end of the course, as a result of all that forced distraction. Goldsmith says he hopes the distraction will place his students “into a digital or electronic twilight,” similar to the state of consciousness between dreaming and waking that was so prized by the Surrealists.

戈德史密斯说，其目的就是让学生在强制分心的情况下，能在课程结束时写出好文章。戈德史密斯说，他希望分心能让他的学生置地于“一个数码的，或是说电子的朦胧状态，”和超现实主义学家十分重视的梦与醒之间的意识状态很相似。

Goldsmith seems to be hoping that forcing students to actively engage in what is usually seen as a bad classroom habit will make them “not want to do that” in other settings. Goldsmith’s highest hope for the class is that students will walk away better from the experience, “having theorized what they haven’t already theorized.”

戈德史密斯似乎是希望逼迫学生积极参与这个“坏习惯班级”能让他们在其他地方“不再想这么做了”。 戈德史密斯最希望通过这个班级，学生们从这次经验教训里变得更好了，“会建立出出他们没想过的理论。”

Of course, not everyone will agree that encouraging young, impressionable minds to divide their attention among a phone, a laptop and a professor is worth the Ivy League tuition. For his part, Goldsmith says he has yet to hear substantial negative criticism of his new course idea, noting that undergraduate education often makes space for ideas and experiments one wouldn’t otherwise get to try.

当然了，不是每个人都会同意让这些年轻的，极易受影响的头脑把注意力分散到手机，笔记本电脑上去，而且这个课能让上常春藤盟校的学费花有所值。从这点上来说，戈德史密斯说他已经听到了大量对他这门新课的负面批评，大学本科教育常常为不能实现的想法和实验提供空间。

“Creative writing and art is the place where you get to try out…things that might seem a little bit outrageous,” he says. “Isn’t that what an undergraduate education is, really? It sounds like a perfect undergraduate class to me.”

“创意写作和绘画是你要去尝试的部分……事情发展可能看起来有一点让人吃惊，”他说。“这不是大学本科教育该有的吗，是吗？对我来说这是最棒的本科课程。”