Tuesday Session 1   

We share the earth with birds and live among each other, but birds are mysterious. What are the habits of the birds in our backyards? How do they keep warm, how do they fly? When, why, and how do they sing? This course is an invitation to examine the lives of some North American birds. Five lectures include topics of bird ancestry and anatomy, diet and nesting, flight and migration, threats, and behavior and songs. We will examine birds of prey, songbirds, waterfowl, and the instructor’s favorite: the common loon.

This course involves walking through parks.

In this course we will walk in the city parks and discuss the wild edible plants we find. These include fruits like Kousa dogwood, crabapple and hawthorn; nuts such as acorn, black walnut and ginkgo; root vegetables like burdock; and leafy plants and mushrooms.

 

Traditional Chinese medicine, including acupuncture and herbal prescriptions, has been in continuous use in the world from 3,000 years ago to the present day. In the West we know it mainly by its technologies: acupuncture, cupping, massage, and herbs, but the real magic lies in its theories and philosophies about health and the role of humans in the universe. This course explores the theory and practice of Chinese medicine and how to apply this knowledge to understanding your own health.

This course will offer a general academic survey of five major world religions (Hinduism; Buddhism; Judaism; Christianity; and, Islam) to get at the diversity and complexity as well as the similarities between religious systems. Topics will address central concepts unique to each religion, such as rites of passage, notions of good and evil, and corporate as well as individual spirituality. Students will be encouraged to participate in class discussions that seek to create a climate of value-neutral discourse on religious topics.

This course is not an introduction to using your iPhone and iPad.

For a few years, many of us have been taking a lot of digital photos with our iPhones and iPads. Now might be a great time to take a closer look at becoming a better photographer and editor of all those accumulated pictures. We will explore the various apps that come with your iPhone and iPad as well as investigate some additional resources not provided by Apple. Please note: This course is appropriate for those who routinely take photos with their iPhones and iPads, have used them for several years, and feel comfortable and knowledgeable navigating their devices.

 

This course will consider film stardom from the 1920s through the contemporary era, through five case studies examined week by week. We will not only investigate actors but the nature of film stardom itself—the qualities that have traditionally been associated with that level of celebrity within Hollywood culture. Films will be viewed by members in their own time before the class.

People are normally able to respond to a variety of pathogens using their immune system, in processes which we will explore. But sometimes the immune system is perverted from its beneficial role and turns on the host to cause autoimmune diseases and/or allow cancers to grow. Thus, the immune system can be seen as a friend to combat sickness or a cause of sickness when the body goes to war with itself.

From reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding, participants will learn much about McCullers and her themes. McCullers explores the immense complexity of love in all its permutations and combinations, long before gender diversity became a culture wars battleground. She takes us into the lives of literary characters not typical of the time, including the deaf and non-verbal, alcoholics, and cross-dressers. Without becoming preachy, McCullers shows Black characters attaining dignity in the face of an abusive system, basing her narratives on growing up in Columbus, Georgia long before the Civil Rights Movement.

The world has long been dominated by capitalism. But mainstream debates about current global inequalities and environmental dangers often avoid mentioning it altogether or exclude the extensive scholarship that looks critically at its class dynamics and their relation to contemporary concerns. We will explore what this excluded scholarship can offer, especially when it is used expansively to engage the interplay of class and other inequalities, the cultural, political, and ecological dimensions of these relations alongside their economic ones, and the significance of capitalism’s repeated crises.

In this course, designed for students with minimal prior knowledge of French, our focus will be on mastering phrases and set structures that may be useful for communicating across a variety of situations. Students will be encouraged to develop strategies to try to make themselves understood where language proficiency may be lacking. The material presented in the Beginning Level French course will vary each term according to the needs of the participants.