Tuesday, May 9, 2017

aging is as aging does #sol17

collage of diverse senior head shot avatars
While most teachers in the SoL blogging community are dealing with the end of the school year and planning summer, I have no student work to process, and summer is just another season for the retired. So I enrolled in a Future Learning online course, Strategies for Successful Ageing, from Trinity College, Dublin. That last should explain the spelling anomaly. 
Find out how staying happy, healthy, socially-connected and active can help you age successfully, with this free online course....This course is relevant for adults who wish to acquire strategies for successful ageing. No previous experience or qualifications are required.

Successful aging focuses on three core areas: managing health, personal development, staying involved

I like to think I already have a good handle on the topic -- all three aspects. Besides collecting aging/senior resources as an ongoing research project for myself and a local agency on agency, I'm checking out the course with an eye to recommending it to other High Plains Manor residents who might be interested.

Course design is a standard mix of videos, reading, short writing on a weekly question and online discussions. Conversations with other seniors from around the world are the best part. The first week's question is "What is age?"
• Week 1 explores your perceptions and attitudes about ageing; 
• Week 2 focusses on improving your happiness and wellbeing, by defining what quality of life means to you; 
• Week 3 places a spotlight on health and presents tips for increasing physical fitness, improving nutrition, and maintaining brain health through the years; 
• Week 4 celebrates opportunities for staying connected by investigating the expectations you have set for yourself and by sharing your personal strategies for staying involved; 
• and Week 5 is all about creative ageing, in which we explore the talents and contributions of older adults and share your accomplishments with the world.
Between daily life in senior public housing (aka Senior Disk World) and maintaining a Facebook community page, Life in the Manor and points west about it. Aging (not just my own) topics keep coming and intersecting with the course. So I'm tackling both here and elsewhere under aegis of aging...has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Good title for another post in a series.


slice of life blogger badge from Two Writing Teachers blog


Slicing has moved from daily to weekly with Tuesday slices. Same submission schedule. On occasion, I start earlier in the day but am by habit, a Late Night Slicer and perennial Pantser. I quit worrying and embraced my inner owl and free for all blogging by the seat of my pants. Whatever your writing clock and blogging tendency, slice and share any or every Tuesday. Read today's Tuesday slices here.

6 comments:

  1. The conversations, and the course, sound wonderful.

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    1. I've been involved with online education since the 90s -- there are problems to be sure, but also much promise. Continuing education and personal learning is, in my opinion, one of its most important roles.

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  2. This is a fascinating topic - I have just returned from a visit to a 91-year-old stroke victim who came through emergency surgery amazingly well, having been in great health all of her life. Your course is a worthwhile endeavor!

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    1. I think there is a determination factor, fed by personal development -- call it abiding curiosity, interest in life and what lies around the corner -- that boosts health. Just observing my own neighbors, when that curiosity fades they are less interest in the environment outside their door and more likely to become isolated.

      In this small community, I see all how all different manifestations of all three factors interact in varying strengths.

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  3. I have been thinking a lot about aging lately. Both my husband's aging parents and the fact that I have somehow moved into a different frame either in my perception or others. When did that happen? Thanks for the thinking points.

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    1. I suspect the inevitable change in perspective -- and how we define "old" -- depends on individual experience and will vary widely. Then there are external socio-cultural factors.

      There are so many factors in the shift. Surely the turn to nuclear families, especially in the U.S. and not growing up in a multi-generation household changed perceptions dramatically. In my mid-30s, my mother, my teen-age daughter and I shared care-taking my mother's mother. Then in my mid-fifties, I took care of my mother at home through a year of hospice. Now, at 73, this is both familiar and unfamiliar territory.

      I still have to write and post my answer to the week 1 "What is old?" question. Even with all that first hand and personal experience, I'm still not sure

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