Our first meeting together gave me a good impression of how our Life Course Scholars class was going to be different from most classes I’ve taken at UCSD in the best way possible. Coming into the class, I had very little expectations overall and tried to keep an open mind. I was surprised to see that we would be having a day retreat before our first class. I wasn’t sure what we would be doing for that long aside from the scheduled lunch and presentation by Patricia Benesh. I thought it would be like syllabus day for most classes at UCSD, but even those usually don’t last over an hour. We ended up spending a good amount of time trying to get acquainted with our peers first. It was refreshing to have that small group face-to-face interaction we so often lose in the large lecture style classes of UCSD.
Another surprise was the scheduled mindfulness walk. Most classes try to bust through long to-do lists of topics to cover from lesson to lesson. However, this walk gave us the opportunity to break from that with scheduled relaxation and reflection. These activities gave me two mindsets I hope to implement through the course of this class, which is to: (1) keep an open and active listening ear to all those I’ll meet and (2) reflect on my life as it goes and to not get too stressed over the hustle and bustle of life.
The “When I’m 80” activity was also a particularly memorable moment. Through the activity, I recognized I don’t actually know much of what people do in their older age. Furthermore, I recognized as we are young we tend to concentrate all of our goals early in life and use older age as the time to do things we didn’t think we had time for before. Through this class, I hope to challenge my current thinking and learn about the lives/perspectives of older adults in San Diego.
Another surprise was the scheduled mindfulness walk. Most classes try to bust through long to-do lists of topics to cover from lesson to lesson. However, this walk gave us the opportunity to break from that with scheduled relaxation and reflection. These activities gave me two mindsets I hope to implement through the course of this class, which is to: (1) keep an open and active listening ear to all those I’ll meet and (2) reflect on my life as it goes and to not get too stressed over the hustle and bustle of life.
The “When I’m 80” activity was also a particularly memorable moment. Through the activity, I recognized I don’t actually know much of what people do in their older age. Furthermore, I recognized as we are young we tend to concentrate all of our goals early in life and use older age as the time to do things we didn’t think we had time for before. Through this class, I hope to challenge my current thinking and learn about the lives/perspectives of older adults in San Diego.