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Enriching lives through the joys of lifelong learning
Inside the January/February 2019 issue, No. 122: Nothing Gold Can Stay (1923) by Robert Frost, page 2 Maine Turns 200!, page 3 Preview of Spring Classes, page 4 Faculty Corner: Partisanship is Passe by Paul Kando Remembrance of Jean Scott Creighton and Dorrie Welch by BJ Frederick, page 8 Events: People participating in a discussion of the film Schindler’s List,
page 9 Brown bag luncheons film discussions, page 10 Other educational events in the community, page 11
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A glass negative, originally taken by a photographer from Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Co., a postcard
manufacturer, of two women and a child posing at Lovers Rock in East Wilton, Maine, circa 1915. Courtesy of the Penobscot Marine Museum. Retouched by Marmaduke Percy. Circa 1915
This media file is in the public domain in the United States
Nothing Gold Can Stay (1923) By Robert Frost
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.
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MAINE TURNS 200!
Maine will celebrate its statehood bicentennial in 2020, and the Coastal
Senior College is gearing up for the big anniversary. Members of the
Curriculum, Events, and Marketing Committees are teaming up to plan
public programs around four main topics, all focused on Midcoast
Maine: The Way We Were (the world of 1820), Becoming a State (how and
why it happened), Celebrating Statehood (through popular culture then and
now), and Seeing 1820 Today (the physical evidence that still remains).
Clustered around the major anchor events in fall 2019 and winter/spring
2020, related classes will be highlighted in the regular course offerings.
This combination of special one-day programs and extended classes will
feature a mix of regional experts, public historians, performers, and local
sites. Watch the newsletter and the CSC website for updates and details,
and contact [email protected] on the new Bicentennial Celebration
Committee with any suggestions for presenters, locations, or courses
connected to the Bicentennial project.
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PREVIEW OF SPRING CLASSES
Find more specific information in your catalog coming in the
mail by the end of February
COURSE: THE HISTORY OF TELEVISION SITCOMS INSTRUCTOR: PETER IMBER COURSE: THE MOON-LANDINGS - WHAT WAS THE POINT? INSTRUCTOR: DEREK WEBBER
COURSE: CREATING WITH COLLAGE -- EXPLORE, EXPRESS, HAVE FUN! INSTRUCTOR: DEBORAH STEVENSON COURSE: WE KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE: THE SURVEILLANCE STATE INSTRUCTOR: PAUL SOMOZA COURSE: AENEAS, HERO OR CAD? INSTRUCTOR: BYRON STUHLMAN COURSE: BEGINNER DRAWING INSTRUCTOR: CYNTHIA DIAS COURSE: EDITING TECHNIQUES: HOW TO CUT AND PRUNE YOUR WRITING INSTRUCTOR: CAROLINE JANOVER COURSE: A GUIDED TOUR OF COSMIC SPACE AND TIME INSTRUCTOR: TED WILLIAMS COURSE: THE REBELLIOUS ART OF THE DUTCH GOLDEN AGE INSTRUCTOR: ANTOINETTE PIMENTEL COURSE: WHAT'S UP WITH THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE EXPLOSION? INSTRUCTOR: MICHAEL WERNER
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COURSE: GROUNDED POETS: ROBERT FROST and SEAMUS HEANEY INSTRUCTOR: JOHN WARD COURSE: DANCING WITH THE DAFFODILS THE MATURE POETRY OF WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE INSTRUCTOR: MARYANNE WARD
COURSE: WHAT IS THAT MONUMENT IN THE TOWN SQUARE? MAINE'S ROLE IN THE CIVIL WAR, PART II INSTRUCTOR: RICHARD MAYER
COURSE: AFTER CAPITALISM INSTRUCTOR: PAUL KANDO COURSE: THROUGH THE LENS OF SATIRE: GULLIVER’S TRAVELS INSTRUCTOR: ANN NESSLAGE
FACULTY CORNER
By Paul Kando
Partisanship is passé
The 2002 Nobel prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to psychologist
Daniel Kahneman for his work on behavioral economics. His research on
that subject and on the psychology of judgment and decision making is
summarized in his best-selling book Thinking: fast and slow. In it he credits
humans with the ability to think in two distinctly different ways (labeled
System 1 and System 2), as illustrated below.
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System 1 (fast) thinking is instinctive, effortless and automatic, devoid of
self-awareness and control. “What you see is what you get”. Much the
same way as other animals instinctively size up their surroundings in quest
of survival, System 1 quickly assesses the world, on the fly. It is useful,
fast, but also error prone.
System 2 (slow) thinking is rational, conscious and deliberate—an effortful,
controlled mental process. It is self-aware, logical, skeptical and analytical.
It questions, and seeks new or missing information that it critically
evaluates. System 2 makes informed decisions.
All human beings are capable of both ways of thinking. If we imagined a
membrane between these two ways of thinking, it would be permeable. We
can switch back and forth between the two ways of thinking at will, although
success with thinking slow depends heavily on our access to information.
Reflecting on the above, it seems that believing is both a product of, and a
welcome assist to, fast thinking, as it eliminates the need (and effort) to
search for and evaluate information. Popular labels by which we tend to
classify people, such as “conservative” or “liberal”, “right wing” or “left
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wing”, “Democrat” or “Republican”, “religious” or “atheist”, etc., are but
simplistic boxes into which we can mindlessly sort our fellow humans
without the need for any further consideration.
Based on Kahneman’s insights, I dislike such classifications. I see, instead,
only people who are either fast thinkers, slow thinkers, or demagogues
(and their hangers-on) who have figured out how fast thinkers (and their
predisposition to believe and to follow) can be exploited and manipulated
for personal self-benefit, be it power or monetary gain.
Among the fast thinkers there may be a mentally deficient minority
incapable of crossing the permeable boundary between fast and slow
(instinctive and rational) thinking. Everyone else, however, is free to cross
over.
This should free us from the mental shackles of “partisanship” and other
forms of prejudice and open up broad avenues for educating ourselves and
one another to be respectful of fact, scientific inquiry, and each other’s
capacity to search for and analyze truth. It should also free us from
domination by demagogues, whose shenanigans (exploiting grievances,
scapegoating, setting groups of people against one another) are quite
transparent to System 2 thinkers.
Our challenge, then, is to encourage everyone not to believe and follow,
but to do their own rational thinking. Imagine a world where most people
actually engaged their brains and set out to help solve our many very real
problems!
Paul Kando is a retired engineer living in Damariscotta. He is cofounder of
the Midcoast Green Collaborative, writes the weekly Energy Matters
column for the Lincoln County News and conducts research and lectures
widely on energy and policy. He has taught numerous classes and
workshops for Coastal Senior College
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Remembrances by BJ Frederick Jean Scott Creighton
This fall Coastal Senior College lost one of its
strongest supporters and instructors. Jean Scott
Creighton passed away in September, 2018, just
before her 95th birthday. Jean, then a Thomaston resident, attended
several of our organizational meetings back in 2001 when we were just a
wonderful idea for Midcoast seniors, and she subsequently offered to
present one of our first eight classes in the spring of 2002. Her "Maine
Writers on Writing" brought eight of Maine's foremost novelists and poets to
our students, including Tess Gerritsen, James Nelson, Chris Fahy and
Jean herself. A literary scholar, she ultimately wrote thirteen mysteries,
many situated in Maine's Midcoast, under the pen name of JS Borthwick
(taken from a Scottish ancestor).
For eleven years, from 2002 to 2012, Jean taught every fall and spring
session, missing only two terms. Her courses, which always had a wait list,
alternated between literature (Hamlet-Old and New; Two Southern Voices-
Faulkner and Welty; Contemporary Drama, etc) and actual writing
workshops (Writing Your Life; Creative Writing, etc.) She continued writing
and teaching well into her eighties and beyond. Her last work, "Fifteen
Birds and a Rabbit", finished this past summer, featured her own paintings
and poems about birds. Jean was a strong, dynamic force, contributing
significantly to CSC's initial success. She will be greatly missed.
Dorrie Welch
Dorrie Welch, a founding member of Coastal Senior College, died in New
Hampshire in Sept. 2018. During the first four years of CSC Dorrie was a
moving force, serving on the Board and the Curriculum Committee. She
was our second president, working hard to make a success of our fledgling
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college. In 2005 she and her husband Jess moved from being full time
residents of Long Cove in Chamberlain, to be closer to their children and
grandchildren in New Hampshire. After Jess died and Dorrie's health
began to fail, she moved to a retirement village in Concord. Although only
active in CSC for a few years, she maintained an ongoing interest in our
progress and in the senior college movement in general.
BJ Frederick is a founding member of CSC, having first served on the
original steering committee in 2001. Until she moved from the area in
2016, she not only continuously served on the Curriculum Committee, but
also at one time or another, on every committee except Marketing. She
was on the Board for 13 years, serving as President in 2007. She was also
a faculty member, teaching “Beginning Bridge” and “Train Your Brain.” She
now lives at the Highlands Retirement Community in Topsham with her
husband Les.
EVENTS
Discussion of the film Schindler’s List
The Coastal Senior College sponsored a brown bag luncheon discussion
of the 1993 film as part of the Classic Film Club
series at the Lincoln Theater in Damariscotta.
Directed and co-produced by Steven Spielberg and
written by Steven Zaillian, the film follows Oskar
Schindler, a Sudeten German businessman, who
saved the lives of more than a thousand mostly
Polish-Jewish refugees from the Holocaust by
employing them in his factories during World War II.
It stars Liam Neeson as Schindler, Ralph Fiennes as
SS officer Amon Göth, and Ben Kingsley as
Schindler's Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern.
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Many people participated in the luncheon discussion and stayed to talk
after the discussion period ended. Hungarian born Paul Kando of
Damariscotta talked about his late father, then a government official, who
worked with Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg to save Jews in
Budapest.
On January 27, 2019 at 12:30 the Lincoln Theater screened "Who Will
Write Our History," as part of International Day of Commemoration in
Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, co-sponsored by the Holocaust
and Human Rights center of Maine, https://hhrcmaine.org/ and provided
information about this during our brown-bag discussion. For further
information and suggestions of future films to see and discuss, please
contact Bruce Rockwood who coordinated this event for the Coastal Senior
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College, at [email protected]. For further information on the film
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schindler%27s_List and
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-schindlers-list-1993
Brown Bag Discussion of the film Green Book
On January 29th, 20 people attended a brown bag discussion of the film, Green Book,
facilitated by Daniel Hall. Sponsored by the Midcoast Meeting of Friends and the Coastal
Senior College, the event, was free and open to the public.
First-nighters posing for the camera outside the Warners' Theater before the premiere of "Don Juan" with
John Barrymore, Washington DC, 08/06/1926.
Have you enjoyed a movie lately and wished to discuss it with others?
Have you attended one of our brown-bag luncheon discussions of films
in the last two years? CSC Events Committee is looking for people
interested in combining visits to current films with film discussions and
who would like to help choose and schedule these events in Camden,
Damariscotta and Boothbay region. Please contact Bruce Rockwood at
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[email protected] or Chris Frost at [email protected] if
interested.
OTHER EDUCATIONAL EVENTS IN THE COMMUNITY Paul Kando gave a talk entitled “An Optimist’s Approach to the Climate Crisis.” The talk,
sponsored by the Midcoast Green Collaborative and Midcoast Outreach and Peace Center,
took place on Tuesday, January 29 from 2-4 pm at the Friends Meeting House, Belvedere
Road, Damariscotta. The talk was free and open to the public.
Send your writing and photographs to be in the eNewsletter
Starting in March we are planning to get the eNewsletter out on a monthly
basis, with more articles, more pictures and more contributions from members
and faculty. So please get your writing and photographs to me by the 30th of
each month. And I will do my best to get the enewsletter out the second week of
the next month. [email protected]
Do you enjoy teaching adults who love to learn?
Do you have an interest in topics that you’d like to share with your friends
and neighbors? If so, we invite you to become a member of the Coastal
Senior College faculty and our learning community of over 400 members.
Our mission is to enrich the lives of seniors through the joy of lifelong
learning. CSC is one of 17 members in the Maine Senior College Network
Our 30 plus volunteer faculty include academics, professionals, and
knowledgeable instructors who graciously teach classes in the liberal arts
and sciences, healthy living and outdoor and hands-on learning to those 50
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and older in Lincoln and Knox counties. We invite you to discuss teaching
opportunities by contacting the curriculum committee co-chair, Byron
Stuhlman, [email protected]
Thanks to Judith Miller for the owl drawings
Any questions or comments please contact Cecile at [email protected]
Coastal Senior College
UMA Rockland Center 91 Camden Street, Suite 402 - Rockland, ME 04841
207-596-6906
