The kids have a couple of activities lined up for the summer; camps and whatnot. While looking for these activities in the brochures and online catalogs, I noticed there are many night school offerings for adults. Berta and I took a few couples’ classes at the Kitchen Workshop in the past, learning how to make Moroccan, Mediterranean, and Cajun food. Those were pretty fun. But I’d like to take some other types of classes, or participate in other events, assuming they’re affordable.

The one I’m most looking into is a Photoshop training class. I can use Photoshop to a certain degree, but I mostly depend on Fireworks for my day-to-day web development requirements. (Fireworks is better for web work than Photoshop, feature-wise.) But I would like to learn the more compositional/creative features of Photoshop, not just the slice and resample features that I use for work. I’d like to learn how to use Photoshop to compose a graphic, and how to use its retouching tools to fix photos I’ve taken myself. These are things that I either don’t know well or don’t know at all, and would love to have just a basic course to force me through the basics.

Any in-person course would be necessarily different from taking a course online or through a book, because I’d have to sit in the class and participate. If I had questions, I could ask the instructor directly. I would also have specific projects presented with source materials so that I would have a specific task to accomplish that would teach the skills I may want to use in the future. Self-guided learning often fails for me for that reason.

There are many other courses available through the county night school and the local recreation committees. One interesting one was for hang gliding. Sadly, it was just a demo course - you don’t actually get to fly. You get to watch someone else fly. What’s the point of that?

There are some interesting trips available in the summer, too. For example, there are a couple of bus trips into Philly to see the Phillies play. Pretty affordable. There are also some trips to New York, but we’ll be doing that with the Girl Scouts in June, so that’s probably sufficient.

I could also try some of the crazier self-improvement classes. Operate my own business, say. What I found really interesting was a course offered at Springhouse, Project Management for IT. This general topic is something that I could really use in the future. I wonder if the price ($1,485!) is worth it, and if the course material is applicable to the type of work I do. I can’t really imagine using a Gantt chart for any kind of web development.