Winter 2023 - Register Today!   

This history class continues from the previous “Passionate Idea” course with the founding of a new people and a new form of government. We will follow as Americans stumble through one rebellion, two governments, and the doubling of the size of the country led by the most amazing cohort of men imaginable. We will listen to music, look at art, and ponder Enlightenment philosophy as it runs headlong into rock hard reality. It is not necessary to have taken the previous class to appreciate this class.

Have you ever wondered how a particular art object arrived at the museum’s collection or read a news story on an outrageous art theft and thought, how did that occur? Enter the world of art trafficking, art crime, and the grey market that profits from looted archaeological sites, international smuggling transit lines, and made-to-order thefts from private collections and museums. In this four-week course, we will exam the impact that stolen antiquities have on the context of archaeology sites, the economy of the country of origin, and the effect on the cultural heritage of communities and the world at large. We will also exam three forms of art crime: art theft, art fraud, and art vandalism through case studies and investigate how illicit objects become “legitimized” into the world’s billion-dollar art market.

In this introduction to Google Docs, we will show you how document creation and sharing works “in the cloud.” If you have worked with other office productivity software, you’ll be surprised how many features and functions are available in the free Google Apps. We will touch on how Google Docs can fit into and simplify your workflow across devices and operating systems. This class is for desktop/laptop computer users and will include information for mobile devices. The Chrome web browser is recommended on the devices. This in-person class will use recorded and live demonstrations as well as written material

The Art Nouveau era in France appeared at the end of the 19th century in a swirling world of societal changes. The style is characterized by sinuous curves and organic forms with nature as the ultimate source book, particularly the plant world as well as insects and birds that lent themselves to the same stylizing process. Much of the art of the era is influenced by dreams, symbolism, creepy crawlers, opium smoke, and the ideas of Darwin and Freud. The curve of the female body, particularly when combined with long flowing hair, was an inspiration for decorative possibilities.

On August 26, 1846, Birmingham, England was buzzing with excitement for a great composer was premiering his latest choral work. Everything about the event was huge - huge capacity audience (1100), huge orchestra (125), huge chorus (271), plus pipe organ. The composer/conductor was Felix Mendelssohn. The piece of music was Elijah, an oratorio. Elijah is sometimes overshadowed today by works like Handel's "Messiah," Haydn's "The Creation," Mozart's "Requiem," and Brahms's "German Requiem." "Elijah" still contains all the beauty that so excited that audience. We will explore some of the choral writing techniques that Mendelssohn discovered in the music of Bach and Handel. We will explain musical terms like oratorio, overture, aria, chorus, and recitative. Most of all, we will listen to the music and learn what to listen for to enhance our enjoyment of this great work of 19th-century choral art.

NOTE: mode change from in-person to ONLINE via ZOOM. 

We ignore, tolerate, admire, and modify our skin on a daily basis but seldom do we really stop to appreciate the biology behind our skin. As the largest organ system in our body, there is much to admire in its structure and how it functions. Come explore the biology behind healthy and damaged skin and see how science is advancing our understanding and ability to repair skin. In the second class, we will explore the many products touted to improve the health and appearance of our skin. A lotion-making demonstration will illustrate the chemistry behind lotions. We will then investigate ingredients, labels, and regulations regarding claims manufacturers can make about their products.

This course is appropriate for new gardeners as well as those who have been at it for a while. Students will learn ideas, techniques, and solutions they can apply to their particular gardening needs. Topics include how to plan and maintain a sustainable garden in a time of climate change and less rainfall, gardening successfully at any age, improving success by selecting plants to fit the garden's conditions, maintaining a perennial border, gardening in containers, using bulbs for year-round colorful gardening, inter-planting vegetables and flowers, starting seeds indoors, health-friendly plants and growing plants to feed pollinators such as butterflies and bees. We will discuss where to find additional gardening knowledge, such as key books and websites and Master Gardener answer clinics. Colorful pictures will help illustrate the topics we explore.

Hallelujah! “Messiah” composer George Frideric Handel (baptized Georg Friedrich Händel) is consistently recognized for his immense contribution to the 18th century “High Baroque” period. His music, which forms one of the peaks of the high baroque style, encompasses virtually every category existent in his time, some of which he himself created. German-born, he became a naturalized British subject, invented the oratorio and organ concerto genres, and also was renowned for his 40-plus operas, anthems, concerti grossi, and many other musical forms. Erica Miner explores Handel’s monumental musical output and his status as one of the greatest composers of his age: a “dramatic genius of the first order,” worthy of a state funeral at Westminster Abbey.

We are going to dive into the free Google Drive services found in your Google account, which will simplify your life and make you more productive. We will show you how cloud-based apps work within the Google Universe. We will cover the advantages of using Google’s office productivity apps – and the pitfalls. Touching on security and privacy, we will show how Google’s products can work with – and sometimes better – than the business software you might be familiar with. This class is for desktop/laptop computer users and will include information for mobile devices. The Chrome web browser is recommended on the devices. This in-person class will use recorded and live demonstrations as well as written material.

“In a rare show of alliance, Apple, Google, and Microsoft have joined forces to expand support for passwordless logins across mobile, desktop, and browsers.” - TechCrunch, May 2022. Devising, managing, and recalling our account passwords has been one of our greatest tech challenges. This has led to weak, insecure, or easily discovered password usage. According to Verizon’s Annual Data Breach Survey, most data breaches are through human factors, like stolen or guessable credentials, phishing, or just human error. So, while we strive to make secure passwords, use password managers, and multifactor authentication, the possibility of going “passwordless” is an exciting one. Let’s explore how real this is, whether it relieves or simply changes our burden, and how to best handle “still passworded” accounts.

Henrik Ibsen’s breakthrough came in midlife, after he had left Norway and was living in Rome. He found release for his dramatic voice and form in the Mediterranean light and in Roman art and architecture in plays that probe the hidden chambers of the soul. “No, I must deep down explore,” Ibsen declares in the poem The Miner: “Heavy hammer, help me enter/Into Nature’s hidden centre.” This course will focus on two plays, "A Doll’s House" and "The Wild Duck"; on how the playwright uncovers and reveals his characters; on how his encounter with Rome informed his dramatic method.

The risks to our democracy are at the forefront of political discourse in 2022. Most Americans believe that our US Constitution guarantees our right to vote and the concept of one-person, one-vote, but the individual right to vote is not explicitly protected and is being put at risk across the country through voter disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, and election processes themselves. Have we reached a point of no return for our American Democracy? How does our electoral system, especially the Electoral College, impact our ability to carry out free and fair elections? This class will evaluate the current consensus among political scientists, from both the US and abroad, as well as well-known authors in the field, such as Heather Cox Richardson. We will also study what options we have to protect our democracy moving forward.

Iceland, Hawai’i, and New Zealand; partners in defining Earth’s plate tectonic and allied climate systems. Islands are fascinating fragments of oceanic and sometimes continental crust formed (and still forming) as a result of Earth’s mantle convection system and the resulting motions of the lithospheric (crustal) plates at its surface. With 3 very different plate motions, and equally different climates, 1000’s of km apart, these three islands tell unique stories of plate interactions and the climate systems that result. Our course will first describe the basic system of plate tectonics, with details and evidence created since the break-up of the most recent super-continent, Pangaea. Then we will look into the detailed tectonic and climate regimes of each of these islands and how they exemplify the scale and scope of global tectonics and climates.

We will learn some of the lesser-known facts about the marine wildlife in our backyard—the marine life of the Puget Sound tide flats. This course will include orcas, harbor seals, river otters, eagles, osprey, great blue herons, sea stars, geoducks, jellyfish, moon snails, and sand dollars. We will also review nautical terminology and decipher the international maritime signal flag code.

The philosophical problem of evil is the challenge of reconciling belief in God with evil in the world. The theistic concept of God as supremely powerful, intelligent and good makes the existence of evil in this world very difficult because such a being, it would seem, would make a much better world than this one. All three great theistic religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – face the challenge of addressing this issue. This class will consider formulations of and putative solutions to this problem, drawing upon Biblical responses selected philosophical and literary texts, and writings from Holocaust historians.

We live in a world awash in advertising. Political campaigns inject billions of dollars in all kinds of media as campaign seasons heat up. It just happened with mid-term elections only months ago. What are political ads telling us? What are they selling us? How are they doing it? And how much does it matter? Although our initial impulse may be to close our ears and eyes, there is far more than meets the eye in this ritual. Political advertising turns out to be an intricate and interesting art-form, well worth watching, learning from, and learning about. Join me on this close and sometimes irreverent examination of what is going on in contemporary political advertising—the good, the bad, and the ugly; the efficacious and ineffectual; the positive and the negative (yes, there still is such a thing as powerful, positive political advertising!). And throughout it all, I urge you to keep your eye on the “truth” in advertising. It may be shaping us more deeply than we realize!

In this course, we will conclude our survey of ancient epic poetry with a reading of the masterpiece of Virgil, whom Dante called “my master and my author,” that celebrates the origins of the Roman empire, and provided a model for heroic verse throughout the Middle Ages and as late as Shakespeare. Special attention will be paid to the socio-political environment in which Virgil is writing, as the Roman republic gives way to empire. We will be using Robert Fagles’ translation as our text (Penguin Classics).

PLEASE NOTE: date/time change from 3/3 1pm to 3/14 10am

This course will provide a broad overview of western Washington forest ecology and a snapshot of prevailing forest health issues in our area. We will discuss climate change and its current and expected impact on our forests, as well as management options for the future. Real-world examples will be sourced from Puget Sound forests to explore and discuss concepts.

Hear from a retired US Navy captain about what it was like to serve in uniform for a year in Iraq, what the political and military climate was like in Baghdad at that time, how the US provided intelligence support to counterpart Iraqi agencies, and the degree to which that support was successful. Get some insights on the boots-on-ground culture in Baghdad near the end of the US occupation in Iraq, and on the culture of the Iraq workplace, and the challenges Iraqi women professionals experienced. Finally, hear some firsthand observations about the effectiveness of US efforts to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure.

The Salish Sea region (Puget Sound, the Straits, and all of the land that drains to these inland marine waters) is home to eight million people and numerous other species. This course will provide an overview of water quality, air quality, toxic chemicals, and climate change issues in the region, but will not be a "gloom and doom" recitation of problems. Each session will weave science-based information about these environmental issues with evidence-based environmental hope, past and current success stories, and actions that we can all take to keep our region beautiful and habitable with a good quality of life for us and future generations. Course activities will include lectures, stories, discussions, "show and tell" demonstrations, a video, a TED talk, and a podcast. Each course participant will have the opportunity to develop their personal action plan for protecting and improving environmental quality in the Salish Sea region.

This is not your average book club. Participants make their own reading/viewing choices and come prepared to share a brief review and appraisal. Any author, medium, or genre is great. For example, selections from the 2022-2023 season at the Fifth Avenue Theater (“The Wiz” and “Les Misérables”), the Paramount (“To Kill a Mockingbird”), the Seattle Rep (“Metamorphoses” and “I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter “), and the Seattle Opera (“A Thousand Splendid Suns”) would provide excellent material for discussion. It’s all about the art of storytelling and information sharing. Learn from each other through great informal discussion.

In 1787 it was not clear that Americans would ratify the new Constitution. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote 85 essays, collectively known as the Federalist Papers to defend the Constitution and advocate for ratification. The essays provide insight into the political theories and principles of the men who wrote the Constitution. This series will look at the political context in which the Papers were written, the arguments the framers made to support ratification, as well as the arguments of the Anti-Federalists who opposed ratification.

This course provides a brief survey of the development of jazz music in the United States. A number of jazz styles will be listened to and studied along with important instrumentalists, singers, bands, and composers. Important historical and social events which parallel the development of jazz music will also be discussed. Live and recorded demonstrations of jazz style periods and jazz techniques will be presented.

In this course, we will undertake a reading of the sonnets of William Shakespeare. We will approach the sonnet sequence as an integral whole, charting the narrative arc the poet establishes from the celebration of beauty at the beginning through disappointment and recrimination, into transcendent reconciliation by sonnet 126; after which come the Dark Lady sonnets, and a very different poetic voice emerges. Students are requested to read through Sonnet #30 for the first course meeting. Any edition of the Sonnets will do, though you are encouraged to find an annotated text. The Folger Library edition looks good.

This three-part course will look at the geopolitical flashpoints developing on the global stage (and with global implications) at the beginning of 2023. In all cases, histories, philosophies, regional alliances, and US foreign policy options will be discussed. The format of our conversations will be somewhat experimental and will rely on the participation of the group. The first hour of each session will take the form of a standard lecture; the second hour will be a discussion of five pre-provided Study Questions. Time permitting, we will also open it up to general Q&A. All opinions (respectfully expressed!) will be welcome.

Session 1: China and Taiwan. Session 2: Russia and Ukraine. Session 3: Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Background reading lists and YouTube viewing selections will also be provided in advance to help enrich our discussions.

This course will provide a basic introduction to the vocabulary and ideas of economics. We will discuss definitions of commonly used terms such as "socialism," "capitalism," "free market," etc. The course is specially designed for students who have no background in economics and may be a little afraid of it. We will consider applications to current issues and events.