Group launches local lecture series

By Jennifer Eisenbart

Editor

One of the catchphrases of being an adult?

“You can never stop learning.”

Building a Better Burlington, a local civic group, decided that it was time to put that adage to work, and has scheduled a free adult learning lecture series for February.

Build a Better Burlington has been involved in several area activities, including starting a community garden and working with candidates seeking office.

Member Mary Ann Staupe, who along with Sue Sheldon and Karen Tolle, have started the lecture series, stressed that the group works from donations. This project is just the next in line.

“From the start, we’ve been looking for individual projects for community members to get involved with,” Staupe explained. “We thought that a lecture series for adults would be very on-topic.”

The series will be held at Cross Lutheran Church every Tuesday morning in February from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Former Burlington High School teacher George Barry will helm the first two discussions on Feb. 3 and Feb. 10, talking about “Old Age/Young Brain” and fighting dementia as well as teaching the brain to work on memory skills.

In his final years at BHS, Barry taught specifically about the brain and the ways it learns to the senior physical education classes.

This, he said, is a chance to work with a different group of students.

“The older brain settles in,” he said. “You can have a lot more compassion with yourself if you know how the brain ages, and how to correct it.

“Part of the thing is having the understanding of the brain,” Barry added.

For example, Barry explained, if you find you’ve forgotten a phone number or a name you haven’t used in a while?

“Go and look it up,” he said.

The brain will then reconstruct the information and recreate the links. “If you think about it a couple of times during the day, you’ll have a fresh new memory of that.”

In another example, he said – people forgetting why they walked into a room – isn’t unusual, it’s the brain trying to protect a person. Normally, walking back to the room you came out of will remind you what you wanted to do.

“It’s just simple things like that,” he explained. “I like to share knowledge. I usually study three to four hours a day.

“When I can share knowledge of stuff I’ve been accumulating and accumulating, it’s fun,” he said.

After the lectures, Barry said, people should expect changes.

“Their brain will absolutely not be the same as when they came,” Barry said. “Because they came to learn, their brain changes.”

The final two lectures are:

• Feb. 17 – Keeping financial information safe in the cyber age, with guest speaker Jeff Schmid of Fox River State Bank.

• Feb. 24 – Healthy eating to prevent or manage diabetes with Jill Foster – a diabetes educator from Aurora Health Care – as the guest speaker.

Staupe said the initial lectures are set for a daytime audience, and the group hopes to offer more.

“We hope to expand with an evening lecture series with topics that are germane to families and working adults,” Staupe said.

Building a Better Burlington can be found on Facebook by searching for the group’s name.