By HOWIE SILVER
There is an old saying: “You don’t stop learning when you get old; you only get old when you stop learning.” A few years back, I found myself aging (mentally) from a decline in learning and intellectual activity.
As a young man, I went to college and graduate school. After that, I became of professor of mathematics. Throughout my career, I have enjoyed teaching and learning. But after retirement, I slowly began to lose my edge—my learning instinct. I still read library books and the newspaper, but it wasn’t the same. Perhaps my mind was aging from my lack of intellectual stimulation.
As a man near 70, I didn’t feel comfortable taking courses at a local university or community college with students my grandchildren’s age. And I certainly didn’t want to cram for quizzes and tests. I just wanted to learn and be stimulated again.
Then I discovered the Creative Retirement Institute (CRI), a lifelong-learning program at Edmonds College in Edmonds, Wash., that has been around now for more than 30 years. It offers short, non-credit, college-level courses at a modest cost. The courses meet once a week and are between one and four weeks long.
CRI is not alone. The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute is associated with the University of Washington and offers similar non-credit courses to people over 50. These programs have everything you love about school—the excitement of learning, interesting professors/instructors, making friends with your classmates, and having fun.
These programs have none of the things you hated about school. There are no term papers, no quizzes or examinations, no oral reports, no grades, no $200 books to buy, and no pressure. Basically, all the laughs and none of the tears.
So, I began taking courses at CRI in a broad gamut of areas, many of which I had never taken in college. I took short courses on the philosophy of science and existentialism, the physics of music, the geology of the national parks, the art museums of New York and Paris, the art of Georgia O’Keefe, and the history of America, China, and medieval Europe.
I took courses on opera in Hollywood films, the birds of the Northwest, the history of jazz, the history of maps and mapmaking, political cartooning, conspiracy theories, the intertidal zone, trees and forestry in the Northwest, and the creation of the borders in the Middle East.
Again, no tests, just the pure fun of learning and meeting other intellectually curious adults, in courses taught by instructors very well versed in the topics they are teaching.
It was a thrill to be learning again. However, at some point, I asked one of the leaders of CRI, “Why are there no math courses?” The answer was simple. “Nobody has offered any; how about you, Howie?” So, if I was sincere in my quest to renew my intellectual stimulation, I needed to accept this challenge.
So I did. I wrote a proposal to teach a mini-course on the paradoxes of infinity. The trick would be to explain the subtleties of infinity in simple, understandable terms to intelligent, non-mathematicians. Also, I couldn’t stand and teach at a chalkboard as in the good old days.
I had to relearn PowerPoint and with it create more than 200 slides. And each slide had to have clear and vivid graphics. That required a lot of visits to the internet, especially Wikipedia, and various books on the topic. But that was the idea, to get my mind active again, and to be teaching in front of people again. And I’d like to think the older adults in my CRI “Paradoxes of Infinity” course found the very counterintuitive notions of infinity getting their minds active again.
After that, I devised and taught a CRI course on visual mathematics, which involved topics such as tiling floors with shapes other than square tiles, spaces where there are no parallels, situations where coffee cups and donuts are the same thing, why the coast of Norway is somewhere between one and two dimensions, and so on. Again, interesting counterintuitive material.
I then went on to create courses on “How to Lie with Statistics” (exposing tricks advertisers and politicians use with numbers), “The History of Zero and Other Numbers You Love,” “What We Learn from Big Data” and a course “About Time.” In all of these, I knew the underlying mathematics, but there were still subtleties that were new even to me.
I was learning along with my retired classmates. Our minds were staying active and alert. And in that sense, we were staying young. Of course, we still had arthritic knees, but our minds were firing on all cylinders. And I thank the Creative Retirement Institute and all the other lifelong-learning programs for that.
Howie Silver grew up near Chicago and has degrees in physics and information engineering, as well as a Ph.D. in mathematics. He is a retired professor of mathematics and computer science at Chicago State University. He moved to the Pacific Northwest to be near his children and grandchildren.
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