Midcoast Senior College, bringing classes to seniors interested in lifelong learning, announces exciting new courses for its Fall Term I. Courses begin the week of Sept. 11 and are four- to eight-weeks long. There is a selection of in-person and online (Zoom) classes. No grades, no exams -- just learning for the fun of it!

Registration starts Aug. 21, online at www.midcoastseniorcollege.org or call us at 207-725-4900.

To register for a course, you must be a current MSC member or a current member of another Maine senior college. The annual $35 non-refundable membership fee is valid from July 1 through June 30 of each calendar year. All courses are $60 per person. A $10 discount is given for two people in the same household taking an on-line Zoom class together. MSC offers confidential tuition waivers to its members from its scholarship fund. Please contact us if our fees are outside your budget. Send your tuition waiver request to info@midcoastseniorcollege.org and we will contact you. There are no forms to complete.

Here are our offerings.

Paul Kalkstein will offer an in-person course, The Tragic Moment. From the famous Greek classics to modern works like Death of a Salesman, dramatic tragedy is marked by the isolation of the protagonist. This course will examine Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s much-overlooked Titus Andronicus to see how the tragic moment comes about, what that moment means for the heroes and the characters who revolve around the heroes, and in what ways the tragic isolation contrasts with the collective moment in comedy.

Dave Cutler will offer an in-person course, Understanding the War in Ukraine. This course will consider the war in Ukraine to help participants better understand why the war started, how it is being fought, and to what it may lead. It will provide background to the current environment and will review the progress of the conflict since the Russian invasion in February 2022.

Barbara Snapp will take you on a journey through Existence – An Earthly Perspective. Are time and space the same throughout the universe? How did matter and life come to be? How do chance and change create complexity? Does consciousness determine reality? In this course we will explore how we know what we know, and how it has affected our scientific and cultural understanding of existence through history into the present. This class is an in-person and online offering.

Like to Explore? Let Terry Porter take you on A Self-Guided Tour of Merrymeeting Bay. Merrymeeting Bay is an amazing inland estuary right in our backyards, but one with surprisingly little access. This course presents a series of self-guided nature walks for five publicly accessible preserves that touch on the Bay. Each class presents a walking guide to a different site, including natural and cultural history, trail details, and directions to the site. This class is online.

Martin Samelson will take students through an in-person course American Sign Language (Handshapes & Simple Sentences). A relaxed demonstration of the 36 basic A-B-C / 1, 2, 3 handshapes used to fingerspell everyday English words and sign useful expressions. Students will enjoy communicating in sign language with family, coworkers, and friends.

Kevin Hart will be offering The U.S. Supreme Court and the 2022-2023 Term. This course will examine how the Supreme Court interprets the law (both the Constitution and federal statutes) in the context of the Court’s decisions from the 2022-2023 term. This is an online course.

Raymond Boisvert will lead students through an in-person course The Wisdom (?) of Children’s Literature. Students will read three books and, communally, make determinations about whether they reveal anything about what it means to be human. Some key questions: Do the books have anything to do with life? Should stories have a moral? What’s the deal with animals? Can adults as well as children learn anything from these stories?

Interested in climate issues? Join John Burr in his online course Maine’s Climate Crisis: Why Is It Happening? What Can We Do? This course will focus on what is happening to Maine, from sea-level rise to the altering of the four seasons, and how this is affecting Maine’s wildlife and plants and posing threats to the fishing and agriculture industries.

Leona Dufour will take students on an on-line literary exploration of Banned Kids: Huck and Scout. This course will explore why Huckleberry Finn and To Kill A Mockingbird come under threat of being banned or have actually been banned in American schools and libraries, practically from the first dates of their publications. Why is each book, centered on the development of a particular child, so threatening to certain parts of the American body politic? What do these works and reactions to them teach us about American illusions, American ideals, and American realities?

Join Bruce Hauptli in his in-person course, Introduction to Plato. Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito provide an excellent introduction to Plato and philosophy. These dialogues are so accessible that they require no prior study yet are so rich that even the most experienced scholars have critically discussed them for more than two millennia. Our discussions will devote time to both the dialogues and some of the historical criticisms of them.

Want to make our world a better place? Join Joseph de Rivera’s in-person course, Steps to Improve Our World. This seminar will focus on how we might make our world a better place. Students will read a book that presents new ideas about who we humans are, what our fundamental motivations might be, and how we might act to improve things. We’ll be discussing alternatives to politics that are neither democratic nor authoritarian, ways of dealing with money that are neither capitalistic nor Marxist, and new forms of spirituality and religion.

George Young will be offering an in-person course, Euripides: Three Tragedies, Texts, and Films. Euripides is often called the “most tragic,” “most modern,” and “most decadent” of the major Greek tragedians. Of his ninety-some known tragedies we’ll read, discuss, and view films of three: Iphigenia at Aulis and Electra, about causes and consequences of the Trojan War, and The Bacchae, about Thebes maddened by Dionysus and wine. For films we’ll watch two brilliant subtitled Greek language works by Michael Cacoyannis (who directed Zorba the Greek) starring Irene Papas, and a British televised Bacchae featuring Terence Stamp and Edward Fox.