By Setarreh Massihzadegan
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE

This month it’s back to school for those who live at Linden Ponds, as the pilot program for lifelong learning courses in the community kicks off.

Home schooling
For a community whose most popular activities include an opera club and the Great Decisions discussion group, it’s no wonder the requests for intellectual activities keep coming. As a result, residents Virginia Bartlett, Mona Gross, and Barbara Ward formed an ad hoc committee to assemble a curriculum of  challenging but nongraded courses for and by the people of Linden Ponds.

The six-week fall semester comprises five college-level courses, four of which will be administered by members  of the Linden Ponds community.

“What makes it special is the fact that the early emphasis is on resident teaching,” says Joan Mahoney, who lives at Linden Ponds and serves on the program’s planning committee.

Whereas other Erickson communities hired outside instructors at the onset of their lifelong learning programs, Linden Ponds decided to go its own way. “We did some investigation, contacted other Erickson communities and UMass Boston, and decided that we would try it ourselves for at least a year,” Bartlett says. “Then if we run out of professors [we’ll] go to a UMass Boston partnership.”

Subject matters
The fall schedule includes a current events discussion course taught by Joan and Ed Lerner; “God or Science, God and Science” taught by Paul Gross; a digital photography course taught by an expert from Noble’s Camera Shop in Hingham; and “Entertaining at Linden Ponds” taught by Executive Director Nina Holt and Executive Chef Jim Rondinelli.

Bartlett will be teaching a course titled “Women on the Frontier,” which will take a look at women in the American West. Though Bartlett worked as a television producer, she says her hobby has been women’s history, a subject she discusses in her book Keeping House: Women’s Lives in Western Pennsylvania, 1790–1850, which she will use as part of her assigned reading.