Agendas to Pitch

Reviewing next semester's course list for the upcoming Osher Institute.  I typically enroll in four.  By now I have my favorite teachers whose offerings get preference, though the attractiveness of the subject matters.  And I basically excluded all On-Demand offerings which I will likely never watch.  And a class that is live with people in the room has an advantage over those I would have to watch on a screen, though a particularly good subject or revered instruction who has shown his quality consistency would remain among the possibilities.

This semester the Yom Tovim are Sat-Sun so all weekdays are acceptable.  I will be traveling the first week, so classes that only appear for the first half are better excluded.

By now I've almost completed my first class by class assessment of what is offered, writing each one of interest on a grid labelled M-F Across and Early AM/Late AM/Early PM Down.  No late PM this time.

And I've pretty much nixed any course where I think the instructor has a personal or political agenda to pitch.  There are quite a lot of those.  I think of myself as a good person, sensitive to women, people of color, people with special needs.  But I also wonder a bit about instructors who nurse the victimhood of these people and use the OLLI forum to do this.  There is something not quite right about disparaging a slave holding Jefferson when everyone in his position did the same while diminishing the achievements as a creative thinker that nobody else duplicated.  I really do want to use my limited four courses to hear about how fundamentally successful people like myself, obtained partly through fortune and partly through diligence, oppressed everyone else.  I understand why the people seeking my vote score electoral points affirming that the mainstream is male, white, Christian, cis.  There has to be a commitment to moving everyone else upward, and I think there is, but I really don't want my limited class time pitching an agenda of my responsibility for everyone else's circumstances.  And there are a lot of those sessions.  No feminism advocates, woke, CRT, anti-Semitism, or born again advocacy or any other soapboxes for me this semester.  Instead, enjoy some science, become better at expressing myself, learn some history, explore parts of the world that I probably won't get to see personally.

I really only have about four selections from a very long list of possible classes.