I must confess I am somewhat anxious for Saturday when I am attending the first art class I will have been to since high school. I took art history in college. I loved it. I hated every art class I had to take in Grades K-12 that involved creating art.
We had good art teachers in our public school. I simply have no talent for drawing or painting. My handwriting is awful. It is even a chore for me to do special decorations on cookies or cakes. We have a very active Communuty Education program here that teaches everything from seed saving to toddler management to learning MahJong to making your own bath bombs. There also are art classes, and Boommate strong armed me into taking a Raku class with her this Saturday. I think it only involves choosing a pre-made piece of pottery bisque and painting it to be fired. I think I can handle that.
In December I am also signed up with her to take a class in which we will create acrylic paintings. It is being held in the high school art room. If it is the same art room from when I was in school, I will probably have nightmares. I would much rather take a class in toddler management!
What does your town offer for Community Education? Ever taken any classes? What were your most and least favorite classes in high school?
WOW! bomb-making. And I thought that things were radical in my home state of California! Whom do the educational leaders of LuVerne imagine bombing?
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High school having been 60 years ago and not a stellar experience in general I can scarcely remember the classes I took or the teachers that taught them. I can, however, say without hesitation that my least favorite classes were the physical education classes. It’s not that I was singularly unfit, I just had no impulse or interest in the sports activities by which we were graded and I found the gym teachers to be uniformly cretinous bullies.
Minneapolis schools offer a great many community and adult education options and I peruse the catalog that arrives in the mail with interest but so far haven’t taken them up on any of the offerings.
I have taken classes at other venues. I’ve had instruction at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts in book binding and book repair as well as alternative printing processes, like cyanotype.
I’ve taken poetry writing classes at the Loft. I have a long history with the Arts Colony of Grand Marais with painting classes, one that combined painting and poetry. My daughters and I took a beginner’s class in pottery—throwing them on the wheel and glazing them to be fired.
During the pandemic, I engaged in many online classes. Most of them were free, so I suppose I can’t complain, but they generally lacked in substance. The one that I took through Harvard, which I paid a nominal amount for, was my favorite. It involved interpreting history through objects—the sort of activity you might expect of a museum curator, and there was a lot of writing involved. Regrettably, the course offered no interaction with the instructor. All that writing was subject to review by peers and I would have to say that their comments were unsatisfying.
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I enjoyed school for the most part and I can’t really think of any high school classes that stick out as my favorite. I did have a favorite teacher Gerald Fugate, who taught English. He was the one who encouraged me to read my first science fiction novel and he also gathered a small group of students together and we formed what we called The Poetry Circus. We did a handful of field trips to elementary schools and read poetry to kids.
My least favorite class is easy – it was biology. In fact, I took biology in summer school because I added up the hours that I would spend in class if I took it during the year versus taking it in the summer. It was about 20 hours shorter I believe – significant in my eyes. The unintended benefit was that I was the only one in the class that summer who was not taking it because I had failed it the year before. That made me the teacher’s pet in the first 10 minutes and when it came time for dissection and I was turning green, I was excused. Woo hoo.
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Oh, forgot about the community ed classes question. It’s been years, but I used to take them on a fairly regular basis. Looking back, one of my most notable must’ve been Ukrainian eggs. In fact, the egg table is up right now.
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