Tuesday Session 1   

Curious about learning Mandarin Chinese? Traveling to China? Or need a refresher course on tones and customs? Join us for a course on travel phrases commonly used if you are planning a trip or if you would like to learn the basics of a new language. This course is designed for learners with little to no experience to novice speakers.

Society is composed of a mixture of people with various backgrounds, cultures, experiences, beliefs, and practices that can bring challenges as we communicate and interact with others. Members will explore several topics that increase effectiveness in communicating and interacting with diverse others. Beginning with a brief look at American history, the course will move to an exploration of implicit/unconscious bias, microagressions, privilege, and intercultural competence. Members will engage in self-reflection and will learn techniques to address bias without causing others shame or guilt.

Garden Guru Doug Oster shares his love of fall planting. He will cover soil preparations, perennial planting, late season vegetables, share bulb planting tips, tree and shrub planting, and much more.

This course explores the following 14 flawed democracies in the world: Malta, United States, Chile, Slovenia, Israel, South Korea, Belgium, Botswana, Lithuania, Italy, Poland, Cyprus, Slovakia, and India. Key characteristics of flawed democracies include weak checks and balances and corruption in functioning of government, low confidence in political parties, polarization, voter apathy, and more. We will analyze geography, climate, demographics, history, politics and government, economy, and culture of each country according to a variety of indexes.

Claude Monet was born in Paris but moved to Le Havre on the Normandy coast around the age of five, and a love of the water and the coast never left him. Throughout his life, he would commonly return to his home town to paint and find inspiration. Although Monet is known for his time in Paris and for the water lily pond he cultivated at his home in Giverny where he settled in 1883, the beaches of Normandy are where he learned to paint and continued to be a major focus for the entirety of his career. This course will look at Monet's time spent in and around his hometown of Le Havre and in the countryside.

In this course, designed for members 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. Members will be encouraged to develop strategies to try to make themselves understood where language proficiency may be lacking. The material presented in this course will vary each term according to the needs of the participants.

Note: Members may only take one French course at a time.

This course explores the grit, heat, and heartbreak of the American steel industry through two seminal works of labor literature: Thomas Bell’s Out of This Furnace and William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge. We will examine how the mills acted as a crucible, melting down old identities, whether European immigrant or Southern sharecropper, and forging something new, though often at a devastating human cost.

Course Materials: Out of This Furnace, by Thomas Bell. ISBN: 978-0822952732.

                             Blood on the Forge, by William Attaway. ISBN: 978-1590171349.

This course offers a critical overview of rock music's evolution from the 1950s to the early 2000s. Through focused listening, cultural context, and artist analysis, members will dive into the sounds, stories, and social shifts behind the music, examining how rock challenged norms, gave voice to generations, and continues to influence artists today. Each week will focus on a different decade of rock and roll, where emphasis will be placed on key artists, shifting aesthetics, and the ways rock music shaped generational identity and cultural change.