Dropping a Class

In my several years enrolled in the Osher Institute Program, I had never previously withdrawn from a class.  In fact, to the best of my memory, I had never disenrolled in any specific class through kindergarten, though I did offer the Rabbi a Sayonara to the whole program in Hebrew School.

It's not that I've had disappointing course selections or had requirements to take certain classes that left me wishing I were someplace else in that scheduled time.  At OLLI I've given some candid adverse feedback.  In one course review I asked the University to send in a Mystery Shopper to see if the instructor's reasonably blatant negative view of Islamists breached University Standards.  I had an instructor up in years who read us his notes for 20 minutes at the start of each session before turning on the DVD of the Great Courses series with an internationally recognized lecturer.  But until now, I've never filled out a form to enable the University to offer my place in the class to somebody on the waiting list.  In fact, in all my years of schooling, I don't think I've ever expressed my negative opinion of a class by silently discontinuing my attendance, outside of a Rabbi series or two at my own synagogue.   The lady who demeaned Islamists has a good heart.  I know her in another setting.  The man who read his presentation from loose-leaf paper was once an esteemed public school science teacher.  Each class had offsetting merit to justify some irritation.  I've never left a class out of boredom.  I've even tolerated my own inability to keep up with the presentations, toughing it out for a full semester of Thermodynamics that flew over my head by about the fourth session.  Even this time, I considered just not coming anymore.  Instead, tomorrow ends the formal Drop/Add process, so I submitted my Drop on time.

So what makes a course tell me it has no salvageable value after two sessions, or really just the first session with the second as confirmation?  It had a formal title of Prosperity and Panic.  The Catalog provided a description that made me expect a dozen lectures or DVD series on economic cycles through the last hundred years of American History.  I lived through some of that.  I heard of the Depression from my grandparents.  Along the way I read about economic cycles.   We have Biblical stories of famines, but we also have the background of Pharaoh storing grain with insider information on a coming shortage.  He consolidated power this way, guided by his Hebrew Viceroy.  The Egyptians made their Faustian deal, but at least avoided starvation.  The rest of us got Pyramids and modern Egyptologists as the legacy of concentrated wealth.

I learned of Adam  Smith's positions on international trade creating global prosperity, though with an underpinning of self-interest.  He tempered it by assigning certain responsibilities to government to protect the vulnerable.  In high school I had to read and report on Andrew Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth.  Only by concentrating wealth can we all benefit from great public works.

I'm the beneficiary of this.  I've had a car for the past fifty years because cars have become plentiful. My TVs get better and more economical with each replacement.  I am connected to the world through cyberspace.  My medicines mostly do what they are supposed to do.  And if somebody else gets rich by making something better for me and for most other Americans, I'm for that.

That's what I expected from the course description.  When you watch Flip Wilson portraying Geraldine, What you see is what you get.  When I attend the two class sessions that's not what I got.  Instead, I sat at a series of long tables with mostly men of my age listening to a retired portfolio manager collecting recent newspaper clippings from the Wall Street Journal and Barron's.  No history.  No assessment of broad policies.  Not even simple things like changes in how investors create wealth and manage risk.  None of that.  At least my own financial advisor has some obligation to me.

The comments of the class shouted pooled ignorance.  As the basis of discussion.  For the first time in my OLLI tenure, I found the exit ramp the best place to be for this class.  Form completed and submitted.