By Melissa Dunson

mdunson@joplinglobe.com

A textbook won’t be the most important part of Dana Robison’s college classroom this fall.

His students will build their own long guns of choice in a gunsmithing course at Northeastern Oklahoma A&M College in Miami.

It’s just one of several unconventional courses that area colleges are offering this year. Parents and other students might do a double take at the schedule, but instructors say it’s all in an attempt to produce well-rounded students who continue learning well after graduation.

Robison’s gunsmithing course at NEO falls into the continuing-education designation for college courses that offer a certificate of completion but not college credit applicable to a degree.

“I’ve had an awful lot of people that want to take this class,” Robison said of the gunsmithing course. “It runs the whole gamut. You’ve got your everyday Joe, then you’ve got your bankers, doctors and lawyers.”

Like most continuing-education courses, the gunsmithing class meets for more hours at a time but for fewer weeks than traditional college courses. Robison’s class meets for eight hours a day for eight consecutive Saturdays this fall. During that time, his students will learn how to use precision tools to make a custom firearm by hand.

For some of his students, Robison said, it’s the first step to a hobby they’ve always wanted to pursue. For others, it’s a pathway to a successful career. For all of them, it’s an area of knowledge they didn’t have before.

Despite teaching the gunsmithing class for several years, Robison said he still gets his share of strange looks.

“Yeah, people are surprised,” he said. “They say, ‘You mean, you’re gonna build a gun?’ With the attitude toward firearms on campuses these days, some people are taken back by that.”

Gene Hilgenberg, chairman of the agriculture division at Crowder College in Neosho, is used to that response by now. For years, he’s taught a meat science and production class in which students take a whole, slaughtered animal and break it down into retail meat cuts. The course is part of the academic requirements for several agriculture degrees at Crowder.

In a laboratory that would make David Letterman proud, Hilgenberg’s students are quizzed on cuts of meat for beef, pork, lamb, goat and deer.

“We wear smocks, but it can get a little messy,” Hilgenberg said.

Well-rounded students