OLLI Resumes

With about two hours to go before my class, my head feels foggy.  Yesterday I served as a research subject as a control in a brain injury study.  I felt challenged by the psychometric tasks, performing some better than others. And the MRI with vibration, my second in a few days, reminded me of a very good amusement park attraction.  If it had the ability to invert or rotate me, it would have been an E-ticket.  Since Osher Institute follows the University schedule, when we have classes, they have classes.  There weren't a lot of students milling around their Main Street business district or around the campus buildings, even correcting for a modest wintry mix outside.  They must be on Zoom, just like OLLI.

Preclasses began last week, an introductory session on Catastrophic Risk, which may have been an actual first class, followed by the first formal session yesterday.  I signed up for a course on how to use Excel better than I do, again with an introductory session last week.   Irrespective of whether my mind returns to optimal in the next two hours, boosted by some coffee, the more lecture type course on the Transcontinental Railroad gets under way.  That's three courses per week, 75 minutes each, which is a good deal less than a college curriculum with 4-5 courses at a time, each with 150 minutes and a fair amount of homework, outside reading, tests, term papers, and some with lab time.  College can be part of life's centerpiece, OLLI cannot, enriching as the time spent there might be.

Another part of college not duplicated is living on campus, now interrupted.  OLLI has its extracurriculars, mainly musical performance or some committee opportunities.  It once also served as an informal gathering place where people would sip the coffee they prepared at home in their thermal mugs, gather at big round tables in the cafeteria for lunch and a weekly guest speaker, or create a personal silo in the mini-library while they type on their laptop or more frequently read a nationally distributed newspaper with traditional newsprint.  Zoom duplicates the classes fairly well but fails miserably in capturing the atmosphere that drives the enrollment experience.  In exchange, I no longer need to devote about a half-hour each direction getting there, which allows me to spread the courses over several days rather than bunching two on the same day.  My coffee need not stay warm for longer than it takes to drink it from a porcelain mug.  And I work in the comfort of My Space.  All decent trade-offs, none ideal.