One seaside university is bowing to the stern educational demands of the times by eliminating its popular course in underwater basket weaving.”
-Appleton Post Crescent, May 14, 1958

How are my classes going? Well on Monday/Wednesday /Friday I’ve got bio and chem. Please kill me. I was going to have my Tuesday/Thursdays free, but then I found out I needed to take calc II and it’s only offered then. So I can forget about sleeping in. But oh my god. You won’t believe what I got into. Professor Duff’s class. Yeah, that one. Intro to Basket Weaving. It might be the best part of my day. It’s only the second week, so we haven’t started on any of the actual weaving, but I feel like I’ve already learned so much.

Like did you know archeologists discovered baskets dated at 1300 BC? They think basket, weaving was the first ever arts and crafts project in the history of the world. It was hugely influential. We looked at these slides of ancient baskets and compared them to today’s baskets and they were almost identical. It was kind of creepy. I’ll never look at a basket the same way again, that’s for sure.

We started talking about weaving styles and methods this week. Duff says Basket Weaving isn’t just about basket weaving. It’s such a broad field. Here’s what we learned the first day: “Everything is basket weaving.” That was the first thing Duff wrote on the board. It makes more sense the more I think about it. Because we’re not just studying how to weave a basket. We’re studying who weaves baskets and why. Basket weaving across cultures. Some cultures are practically defined by the way they weave baskets. The ethical implications of basket weaving. The politics of basket weaving (who gets which basket and why). Once you start applying the study of basket weaving to other fields of study, it’s impossible to think of where it doesn’t fit.

Basket weaving scholars are hard to find, but they are fascinating. We’re reading a feminist critique of Moroccan basket weaving for next week. Then we’re doing a Freudian analysis of influential baskets in history, and then we’re doing Basket-Response Theory. The readings are short and our class discussions are lively.

Basket weaving is still inching along the long road to scholarly respect in academia. Some say it will always be a fringe topic, while others have had the nerve to demote it into a subcategory of sociology. But sociology is boring. It’s all theory, no application. The more I learn about it, the more I come to realize that basket weaving provides a more complete worldview than any other subject I’ve explored.

Not to mention it’s a blast. I’ve got it right after calc. If I didn’t I’d probably go insane. It feels so good to actually look forward to a class for once. I even enjoy the homework. I was starting to think I was paying $40,000 a year just to memorize trivia and learn about dead people. I feel like I’m actually learning something now. Something I care about, something I can use for the rest of my life. Who doesn’t need a basket? And if you don’t need one, they make great gifts. And Duff just mentioned yesterday there’s a fast growing basket weaving and basket appreciation community in the Twin Cities.

I used to think the only choice I had after all this was grad school. What if I just got a loft in the cities, got some reed, some hickory bases and some nice twine, and maybe some dye to experiment with … yeah, I could see myself doing that in a few years. I think I might major in basket weaving. I wonder what my parents will say.