The Valley Art Center energizes and encourages art appreciation in people of all ages and backgrounds through education，inspiration, and opportunities to experience the visual arts. We support art students and artists through quality curriculum and programming along with exhibition space. We promote the growth of each individual's potential and the advancement of the arts in the community.

This course, with a four-hour format, is for serious artists of all levels from beginners to advanced learners. Guidance will be offered on issues such as composition, colors, tools and techniques, but the emphasis of the course will be on thinking creatively. Individual attention will be available whenever needed. The course will end up with a group discussion of the students' works.

IMPORTANT：students will be responsible for bringing all necessary materials，including any desired photographic reference. Supply list is available online. And don't forget your lunch. $192/$173.

Learn the basics of digital photography. We will start with understanding what those symbols on your camera mean. We will explore how to set your own film speed，aperture (孔径) and shutter (快门) speed. We will also learn when to use a flash. We will explore taking action shots，landscapes and family portraits (全家福). In this class you will practice and apply what you have learned using your camera! $96/$86.

Everyone can draw! If you have ever wanted to learn how to draw or just want to refresh yourself in drawing basics, then this is the class for you. This class will focus on building drawing skills through the use of line, value，perspective，and composition. Students will work on a variety of projects with different drawing mediums to develop their personal style. A list of suggested supplies is available online. $96/$86.

In this art form, drawing skills are not required for this colorful and expressive craft. Beginners learn several basic classical techniques and those with experience are guided in other techniques of choice. For those who are making jewelry, this is another form to add to your artist's toolbox!

All equipment and supplies are included in the first project fee of $8, payable to the instructor at the first class. $96/$ 86.

Elizabeth Bishop is considered one of the best American poets of the 20th century. She was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911. Her dad died when she was just a baby and her mom never recovered from the loss; she went to live with her grandparents in Nova Scotia, Canada when she was five. Eventually Bishop attended Vassar College, where she began to write poetry.

At Vassar she discovered Marianne Moore's poetry and met “Ms. Moore” and began their life-long friendship. She later met poet Robert Lowell. She wrote tons and tons of letters to both of them, which is good for us because we would otherwise know very little of her personal life. Bishop's poetry is sometimes considered objective and cold because it shows almost nothing about the poet or her life.

Bishop published her first book of poetry in 1946 and wrote until her death in 1979. She would spend years working on a single poem. Her poems are not the result of hasty scribbling (匆忙乱写) on paper while eating breakfast. Over a lifetime of writing, she only published about 275 pages of poetry, and about 40 of those are translations. She would look through drafts of poems again and again and improve them until they were as close to perfect as she could get them.

Reading Elizabeth Bishop is like being transported to the very place, the very moment she’s writing about. She leads us to a microscope so we can see every smallest part of the scene. It seems she's always asking us to notice more, and more until the poem is so clear in our minds that it’s almost painful — like a light that's too bright. It might take your eyes a while to get used to it, but once they do, you'll like what you see.

At school, I was in the top set for maths. My teachers recommended that I study economics and statistics as my A-level subjects, but I had my mind set on a life fulfilled by the arts.

In fact, I was a victim of a gender stereotype made stronger since birth, that men do science and maths and women do arts or languages. Computer science, technology and physics just did not figure in my teenage world view. Nobody popular in my school chose to study those subjects.

Reality struck hard when I began attending job interviews and interviewers would say: “It’s great that you speak foreign languages, but what else do you do?” Nobody asked my friends who had studied science or technology those questions.

A survey recently showed that three of the best-paid jobs for women are in the technology sector. It’s a sector that really can change the world. We must show girls that technology has an effect on every industry out there, from fashion to architecture to journalism. Anybody can learn to code and these days it’s as important as reading and writing. I’ve realized that at university I’d achieved the wrong kind of literacy. Not being able to code limit your impact on the world far more than an ignorance of great literature.

Now I have a five-year-old daughter. I don’t want her to blindly follow gender roles the way I did. I want her to know the fact that a science or technical degree will not limit her creativity but expand it and broaden her horizons far more than my arts background could. I’m exposing her to Minecraft and apps, which help improve analytical thinking and problem solving skills. I’m hoping that my daughter will discover and accept her potentials in science and want to change the world.

Most of the 20th century has been a development on the Industrial Revolution taken to an extreme: people now own more products than ever before; there are enough unclear weapons to destroy the earth several times over; there is hardly any forest left and pollution has got to the point where we buy water. Within a few years I predict you will be able to buy air. (There once was a time when you didn't need to buy food or shelter either.)

Important developments in the last century are the breaking down of the class structures left over from the Industrial Revolution stage, bringing with it the empowerment of the “common man”： the working day is set by law to only 8 hours a day; everyone has the vote; the media has less obvious government control; people have landed on the moon, sent spacecrafts to Mars and so on. Families have also shrunk drastically (强烈地); the nuclear family came about, and especially in the last half of the 20th century, one­parent families are becoming more common. This shrinking in the size of the family shows the increased independence of people — once upon a time people had to live in large groups to survive.

As humans have “become the gods”， they have realized their individuality and independence and taken their control of the world to an extreme. In many countries the land is almost completely used in the production of food and as living space and they live in small cities which are entirely human constructed, made from materials which are also entirely human constructed (concrete bricks) with hardly any remains of nature. Weeds are poisoned because they are messy; even parks have trees grown in tidy lines; grass is mowed to keep it short and so on. I think the massive drug “problem” troubling people is a result of too much of this influence, humans needing to escape the stark world they have created by entering fantasy worlds.

Over the last 100 years, the 20th century consciousness has spread throughout the world; most of Asia has been thoroughly “Westernized”， and most of the Third World is being overrun by Western ways of doing things and living.

My fiance (未婚夫）and I were excited about shopping for our first home. But our funds (资金) were _______, and none of the houses in our price range seemed satisfactory.

One agent (代理人)_______ a house in particular. Although her description sounded wonderful, the price was _______ our range, so we declined (拒绝). But she kept urging (催促) us to have a look _______.

We finally did and it was _______ at first sight. It was Our Home, small and charming, overlooking a quiet lake. Walking through the rooms and talking with the owners, a nice elderly couple, we felt the warmth and _______ of the marriage within that home. As perfect as it was, the price remained too high for us. But every day, we would sit by the lake, looking at the house and dreaming of _______ it would be like to live there.

Days later, we made a(n)_______ —far below the asking price. Surprisingly, they didn’t _______ us. They renewed their offer ________. It was also much more than we could afford but far ________ than the original asking price.

The next day, we got a ________ message that another buyer had offered a much higher price. Even so, we decided to talk with the ________ directly. We made our final offer, which ________ was thousands of dollars less than the other buyer’s bid. We knew it,________ we had to try.

“Sold!” said the owner. Then he ________: He’d seen us sitting by the lake all those times; he knew how much we loved the place and that we’d ________ the years of work they had put into their home; he realized he would take a ________ by selling it to us, but it was worthwhile; we were the people they wanted to live there. He told us to consider the ________ in the price as “an early wedding present.”

That’s how we found our home and how I learned that when people are ________ they are not strangers, only friends we haven’t yet met.