From the Classroom to Zoom, A Different Sort of Learning Experience

From the Classroom to Zoom, A Different Sort of Learning Experience

Edward Dodson, Class of 1973

A six week course that continues to 2020-05-11

English

Text

from my home in Cherry Hill, New Jersey

Back in the late 1960s as an undergraduate at Shippensburg, my plan was to become a teacher. However, after completing my student teaching assignment, I decided I needed some real world experience first if I was to be of any value to young people. So, I entered the corporate world, where I remained until retiring in 2005. By one of those strange turns of event in life, I had also been teaching since 1981, as a volunteer member of the faculty of the Henry George School of Social Science. Here, my students were other adults, some young, many quite older. In 2005, I was invited to give a few lectures at Temple University's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, where I have been teaching senior adults ever since. Or, at least until the COVID-19 virus caused the closing of the university. The virus also closed classroom activity at the Henry George School's facility in New York. The Education Director contacted me to ask if I would be willing to teach a course of my own choosing using Zoom. I agreed and have delivered two lectures so far to some forty registered students. I decided this would be an appropriate time to examine the lives of some of the nation's key founding fathers: Franklin, Paine, Jefferson, Washington, Adams and Hamilton. The experience is different, to be sure. I miss the level of discussion that normally occurs in the classroom. But, the students seem to be getting something out of it, even if the lectures are only a break from their current routine.