By A class on campus filled with students aged 50 and older, all of whom were eager to read one of their first assignments on Thursday: several memoirs telling stories of deceased pets, having a drink with a bishop and vasectomies.
The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), a volunteer-run program on campus dedicated to providing non-credit classes to adults who are 50 and older, recently started its eight-week session on campus. The program offers a variety of activity and lecture classes, including “A Novel Approach to Memoir Writing.”
“The mission is to keep education going and keeping people lively and brain fit,” said Rebecca Low, office administrator of OLLI at CSULB. “We get a lot of newly retired people who are looking to keep busy … They love interacting with people their own age.”
According to Low, the newest classes being offered this session through OLLI include lawn bowling, advanced watercolor and a class about the Los Angeles Opera.
“We really owe it to the instructors who bring so much passion to develop these classes,” Low said. He added that all OLLI instructors are over the age of 50 as well.
Low said that OLLI had about 800 members last year.
OLLI instructor Reginald Gates said he started out as a coach, assisting in an excel spreadsheets course, but moved up to teaching a class called “Google, email, and more,” which teaches students how to create a Google account, master Gmail and use Google Maps, Drive and Calendar.
“[Our students shouldn’t] be afraid of the computer,” said Pauline Strong, who has taken classes with OLLI for the past eight years and is now a student coach. “Every time you make a mistake, you will learn something.”
There are about 120 OLLI centers across the country, most of which are on university campuses, according to Barbara White, executive director of OLLI at CSULB.
“Our purpose is education, improvement of life and social interaction,” White said. “Many of our members are widows or widowers who often have said, ‘I lost my spouse. I knew that I needed to get out of the house. I didn’t know what to do, and I found OLLI, and now I am out of the house.’ People are learning and have made new friends.”
Ladd Terry is an instructor for OLLI’s watercolor workshop on Fridays and in one of his lessons, he taught students about “value difference” in art, a term used to describe the use of light and dark colors. He gave each student a sketch of a house and showed them how different shades of the same color can give depth to a picture. He then had his students paint on their own.
“Part of [this course] is people want to be entertained,” said Terry, who has recently retired from his 40-year college teaching profession. “They aren’t going for a career. It’s about self-fulfillment.”
Other classes offered through the OLLI program include short stories about aging and other life phases, taking better photos, conversational Spanish, Native American Indian history, John Wayne Film Festival and making sense of investing.
Tuition for each class is $10, and classes in a computer lab cost $35, which Low said is used to keep computer software and classes up to date.
White, who is also the director of the Department of Family and Consumer Science’s gerontology program, said she feels that being associated with the gerontology program is a perfect pairing with OLLI. She said the program’s members are usually happy to go to classes in CSULB to talk about aging and life-long learning.
White said CSULB students are welcome to become involved with the program and sit in during OLLI classes to observe, as long as they inform OLLI members of their presence beforehand.
“It’s important to have a positive experience about aging,” White said. “Aging is not illness and death, which is sometimes how we picture it, but it is vibrant living.”
