Not just Bio 101; Area colleges' course catalogs offer variety of offbeat academic options.(Brief Article)

Ask area college students what the best part of college life is, and attending class might not even make the top 10.

Then again, if you dig deep enough in the course catalog, you can come up with a handful of unconventional offerings that interweave threads of offbeat, mainstream and historic interests into higher education in ways sure to keep students' interest.

Take, for example, a class called Physics in Sports at Oberlin College, where visiting physics professor Eric Goff uses sports to show students how physicists apply models to understand the world.

Exercises include students learning how curve balls curve by flipping plastic foam balls through the air while studying what the air does around the spinning balls.

``I'm exposing them to unsolved questions, or at least ones that only have a qualitative understanding,'' Mr. Goff said. ``I'm not trying to get the students to understand sophisticated details. They are taking a physics class. I'm mainly interested in having students get some understanding of how a physicist approaches a problem - what tools are available to understand how a curve ball works.''

They also watch videos, such as former Boston College quarterback Doug Flutie's Hail Mary touchdown pass in a famous 47-45 victory over the Bernie Kosar-led Miami Hurricanes in 1984. The class uses the video to determine how fast the ball was thrown to get it down the field that far.

``I certainly hope they see the world a little bit differently,'' Mr. Goff said of his students. ``The more information you have, the more you can apply to your daily life and how you understand it.''