Since retiring, classes at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, acronym OLLI, have been the centerpiece of my week. Can't say that I've made friends there but I've engaged with a lot of people. It has become one of the few sources of conversation that I have. While my enrollment takes me to four classes, usually distributed over two days, my time on site includes idle time in their lounge where my contemporaries drift in and out, occupying nearby seats, or their very tiny library where I could read the NYT, though I usually don't, or type out my next article on the laptop that I often take to campus with me, which I do. When my classes span mid-day, most days, I pack lunch and a large travel mug with the day's allotment of coffee, some of which usually finds its way to a classroom carpet when I knock it down from adjacent to my chair in class. OLLI is the experience and the preparation as much as it is the classes.
My last semester's class selections had been a little bit of a disappointment. All interesting in their own way, none provocative in any way, which may be a prerequisite for future courses. As they got cancelled while in progress due to Covid-19, my guess is that I probably preferred the refund, which eventually came, to the class stimulation which this semester did not come. Yet I was also no longer exchanging banter with anyone, receiving the fast quips from others who are my equal at creating them. Travel mugs stayed in the closet in lieu of my ration of three cups make individually at the time I desired them. Planning lunch, let alone when to eat it and with whom? I sort of miss that. Now, at home, if I want lunch at all I know where the peanut butter and the jelly jars are, what kind of bread we have at home that day, and I eat it, without the orange or cookies I would have included in my thermal lunch sack.
On site classes for the coming semester have been transferred to a remote format. As many of us have learned from parallel experiences, some things are gained while others are lost. It has been great enrolling in seminars with the premier experts of the world as guest, something unavailable to me in the prior era when you had to register, pay and show up. Twice they have accepted and submitted my question to the expert. Little gets headier than those 5 seconds of fame when your name is announced to global listeners. Yet the seminar ends when the Zoom host signs out, and the question is never selected by the expert recognizing your raised hand but by a moderator who already knows the question even if the expert does not. Amid the formality, those in attendance also don't get to interrupt at the moment an insight or dubious comment arises. Those things all happen in live class sessions, add immeasurably to the information imparted and don't get duplicated by a screen. Those of us who attend professional society conventions where we watch the invited Plenary Lecture in a cavernous ballroom on monitors scattered through the space are well aware of this, maybe even more so later in the day when we attend a smaller seminar with a lesser professor and especially as we wander through the research posters in the Exhibit Hall chatting with selected people who conducted projects that capture our fancy in some way.
We've probably known since kindergarten that curriculum is really a subset of education. We had to learn the colors and maybe even the letters, but we also got creative in the sandbox and engaged in conflict over who got to use the plastic shovel first. Post-retirement education is no different. We select our classes, do our darndest to pay attention, engage in some interchange, then go to the common areas and exchange notes from where we might go on vacation to what we watched on Cable TV the night before. Keeping a vibrant mind into our later years is partly focused study, but it is also the experience of personal interchange.
I sift through the course offerings, not a whole lot different than previous course offerings. Instead of a global fee, we now pay a la carte per selected course, so I expect to take three. In the past I've timed them to minimize separate trips to campus or to create OLLI and non-OLLI days, something less important when my car is not needed and I don't need to assure interclass slack times to engage with other people. It's a more utilitarian look at curriculum in the absence of some parts of the OLLI experience that are probably more enduring.
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