There are many opinions about what, exactly, “intellectual programming” means. Whether it involves games and puzzles that challenge memory and thinking, activities for building creativity, or maintaining a sense of curiosity about the world, the role of senior living enrichment programs is often in the eyes of the beholder, as they say.
At Meadowood, we strive to meet the wildly different expectations of our residents in a multitude of ways, combining many types of intellectual stimulation with social interaction, too.
We haven’t missed the fact that technological innovations have changed the way people learn and explore subject matters. The role of online learning platforms like MasterClass, Senior Planet Online Academy, and Coursera has exploded over the last decade. Meadowood takes advantage of one called Curiosity U (formerly One Day U). The streaming platform streams live lectures weekly, as well as more than 600 pre-recorded lectures given by experts and professors at colleges and universities worldwide.
Meadowood pays for access to the platform for the whole community. It is free for all residents and staff, who can log on at any time from their own devices and watch as many lectures as they’d like. But learning via technology can be a lonely affair when it’s just you and your computer.
Getting together with others while exploring different subject matters adds another dimension to lifelong learning in retirement. Curiosity U is used particularly to serve as a jumping off point for intellectual discussions for the Meadowood program, “Second Saturday Salon.” Each month, residents watch a pre-chosen lecture on the Curiosity U platform whenever they wish from home and then get together with a moderator on the second Saturday of every month to discuss that lecture.
Subject matters have ranged from the scientific (The Ethics of AI in Medicine), to the historical (The Real Stories of the Six Wives of Henry VIII); from the artistic (Paul Cezanne: The Father of Modern Art) to the spooky (Over My Dead Body: Unearthing the Hidden History of America’s Cemeteries); and beyond.
We’ve played around with the format a bit, sometimes including TED Talks or other online videos, but the formula created with Curiosity U works best. Residents come prepared to support their thoughts and arguments with research and examples, and tangents are not only tolerated, they’re encouraged. There are as many laughs as there are deep discussions, and a few fun surprises along the way.
For example, one particularly delicious Saturday, after viewing the lecture “A Brief History of Chocolate,” participants enjoyed sampling more than 20 different kinds of chocolates from around the world. (There have been numerous requests to repeat the format, only with wine.)
The Second Saturday program format allows residents to watch the lecture whenever they have time, explore the subject matter as fully as they’d like, and have an opportunity to blend the intellectual with the social when they meet to talk about it. It’s a winning combination.
The Salons are in their third year now, and participation has grown steadily since the start. And they are just one of many engaging intellectual programs that blend learning with a social aspect at Meadowood.
Other recent programs that fit the bill include a THINK Happy Hour, where residents got together to draw questions out of a hat and explore and discuss their answers over hors d’oeuvres and cocktails; the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest in which teams created complicated machines to perform simple tasks in crazy ways and then showed them off to the whole community; the ongoing Brain Games class for those who live for logic puzzles, riddles, and word games; and a recent Origami workshop presented by a paperfolding artist who has exhibited her work around the world.
At Meadowood, the members of our community have discovered that whatever their idea of “Intellectual” might be? Yeah, we’ve got a program for that.