So You Think You Know
It All?
After age 65, it’s possible to take university courses
for free. I qualified a long time ago,
and finally this year I signed up. I
didn’t much care which course I’d take.
Maybe history. Maybe
literature. Browsing through the
courses, I made a wish list, but was informed that spaces in all courses were
reserved for those who required them for degree qualifications. Seniors like me had to wait to be informed
that our turn had come to sign up for whatever was left over.
All the courses on my wish list were already gone to
those who needed them, and I was given a list of the leftovers. Imagine my surprise and delight to find the
perfect course—one I hadn’t even hoped for—Creative Writing 200. It’s an overview of the varieties of types of
writing—fiction, non-fiction, blogging, graphic novels, comedy, crime, poetry, and
best of all, writing for children.
Better still, the section on writing for children was to be taught by
our own Alison Acheson!
Before that session began, I approached Alison and
introduced myself. She seemed to think
I’d know everything she had to say, and that it would all be old-hat to
me. Not so. I learned a lot. I had taken writing courses, attended writing
conferences, read books on writing, but I wasn’t sure what was out-dated and
what was new. For example, I didn’t know
that there’s now an age category called “new adult”, going from Young Adult up
to about age 25. Interesting. It was also encouraging to learn that much of
what I thought I knew was still valid. Alison’s
lecture was anything but old-hat.
So what about the other sessions? Did I already know all that stuff? Some of it, yes. Again, I felt a sense of validation when I
could nod in agreement with the professor.
Some of it, I thought I knew, but found I’d messed around to suit my own
way of looking at things. For example,
there’s Aristotle’s triangle, or something.
I’ve always called it Aristotle’s Incline—a plotting paradigm he wrote
about in Poetics. I didn’t do well in that part of the quiz
because I called the points by different names.
The nice thing about taking university courses after age 65, when you
already have your degree thank you very much, is that the quiz is nothing more
than a wake-up call to the fact that, no, I don’t know everything so there’s
good reason to be in this class.
Another reason I’ll be sorry when this course ends in a
week or two, is that I like the in-class writing exercises and the monthly
written assignments (5 pages, double-spaced, submitted online). No excuses such as writer’s block or
busy-ness will do. I work best under
pressure and with deadlines.
It’s a short course, only January to April, held Tuesdays
and Thursdays from 12:30 to 2pm, but now I find myself searching the course
lists again, and making my new wish list.
It would be wonderful to find another creative writing course to follow
this one, because I certainly do not know everything. If I find one, I hope it’ll be one of the
leftovers that I can seize and savour like this one.