News-Star: "Truman College’s Quirky Adult Classes Include Zumba, Beekeeping, Hypnosis"

By Patrick Butler, News-Star, July 7, 2010 (Reprinted with permission of News-Star)

During the past three years Nancy Kramer has been continuing education dean at Truman College, she’s been using everything she learned in her earlier career in customer service management.

Which probably explains the dizzying variety of courses ranging from the usual ‘nuts and bolts’ classes like seven different foreign language classes and web design and development to “Greening Your Property and Neighborhood,” ‘Taking Control of Your Accent,” and Don Quxiote in the original Spanish, as well as Zumba, which Kramer describes as “a hot dance and cardio workout” and self-hypnosis for those trying to quit smoking or lose weight, said Kramer, credited with increasing enrollment in the continuing ed program from 600 to 1,600.

Being the entrepreneur she is, Kramer says she seeks suggestions from Truman teachers and students, as well as neighborhood residents who repeatedly asked for classes on the business side of child care, which Kremer said is currently “a very big thing in the Hispanic community.”

Sometimes the ideas come from people who would like to teach the subject, like the former photo editor who wanted to teach the history of modern photography with the help of some antique pieces of camera equipment she’d been collecting for years, Kramer said.

Another teacher came up with the idea for a “language taster” course that made its debut this summer. Each week students would get a chance to sample one of five different languages.  Still another recently-tried course was a storytelling class that lets students learn about writing and publishing memoirs – their own or family members, said Kramer, noting that one of the teachers wrote about her mother’s days as a WAC in Paris during World War II.  There’s even an upcoming class on Cuba under Castro, taught by a Cuban who lived under the Marxist regime. “Not many people can get to Cuba, but this gives them a chance to learn a little from firsthand,” Kramer said.

Kramer’s department also offers courses in translation, which she said shouldn’t be surprising in a school where students from 152 different countries speak 90 languages. There’s also a class in self-hypnosis designed especially for people trying to quit smoking or lose weight.  That idea came from Kramer herself, who found a smoking cessation expert in self-hypnosis when she herself was kicking the weed last fall.

Believe it or not, beekeeping was also a popular course, she said.  “We get a lot of suggestions and we look at a lot more ideas than we actually use,” said Kramer, noting that ideas that haven’t yet made it to the classroom include Tango dancing, bartering (“I photograph your daughter’s wedding and you fix my toilet”), and a class in “home staging” to teach real estate salespeople how to use lighting and the placement of furniture to help sell a house or condo.

What drives Kramer to keep looking for classes you won’t easily find anywhere else is her own wide-ranging interests from a lifetime of “doing a million jobs,” including service in the Peace Corps in Zimbabwe, and her own “passionate commitment to bring more cool things here.”  For more information on classes to be offered during the fall semester, which begins signups Aug. 1 and starts Aug. 20, call (773) 907-4440.