The first class of the semester involved a lot of tongue slapping, a technique Don McRee’s 17 students were eager to try.
“I hear a lot of good stuff happening here,” said McRee, a retired clinical psychologist whose harmonica course is the most popular in the wide-ranging North East Independent School District community education curriculum. He instructed his students on the fine art of the tongue slap, a way to give more depth to a note, walking around the small classroom as the students “thwonked” their tongues against their instruments.
The district’s community education program was founded in 1960 with a few vocational courses and was later expanded to add English as a Second Language and General Educational Development diploma courses. The program now logs about 4,000 registrations each semester.
You can while away an evening learning to cook a fit-for-company Thanksgiving meal. Busy at night? You can brown-bag it with lunch-hour Spanish courses.
There’s a class called Facercise for people who are considering a face-lift but want to try exercise instead. There’s a course in the “do’s and don’ts of office romance” and a slew of classes for people looking to polish their resumes with improved computer skills.
Like many of McRee’s students, Billie Murrell is back for her third semester of harmonica lessons. An amateur astronomer, she likes playing a small acoustic instrument that she can take along when she goes to look at the stars.
Murrell began taking community education courses in the early 1990s, when she signed up for a videocassette recorder repair class. Soon she was spending her retirement fixing other people’s broken VCRs.
It worked out so well, she signed up for an auto repair course.
“Every semester I do different ones,” she said. “It’s just to keep the mind active.”
There are classes for people who want to let the mind relax too, including at least a half-dozen courses featuring hypnosis.
At a Better Study Skills Through Hypnosis class last week, Peter Crook, 13, yawned, flashing his braces, as he woke from a hypnotized state.
The class was “awesome,” said the Lopez Middle School student who attended with his mother, Arlene.
Peter is already a good student, his mother said, adding, “He could fine-tune a little.”
Jerri Collins said she quit smoking with the help of hypnosis 20 years ago and is hoping for similar success this time as she prepares to study nursing.
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