Like freshmen on their first day of high school, the roomful of women laughed and giggled as they worked on their class assignment.
But unlike a round of Algebra I, teacher Karen Ter Haar didn’t scold her pupils. Instead she walked from student to student, assessing their work and offering tips on how to make it better. All the while the atmosphere encouraged her charges to have fun.
Ter Haar is from Melbourne, Australia and was in Sweet Home over the weekend to conduct calligraphy classes at Linn-Benton Community College and during a Saturday meeting of the All Oregon Calligraphers Conference held at Sweet Home High School.
Sweet Home was her first stop on a seven-week tour of the United States that takes her from coast to coast. It will be an exciting adventure she says, and it came about because of her love of letters.
“I took calligraphy classes at what we call a Neighborhood House,” Ter Haar said. “It is an old house bought by the city, administered by a paid administrator and volunteers that offers education to adults at affordable prices.”
In the business world until 1980, Ter Haar then took time out to have two children. In 1988 she began her calligraphy journey.
“I just like letters, their form,” Ter Haar said. “I can’t explain why. I just like letters. There is so much you can do with it. Nothing wrong with macramé, but there’s just so far you can take it.”
Ter Haar says she is self-taught and also completed an intensive two-year program called “For the Love of Letters.”
She has taught classes for more than a decade, but this is her first international experience.
“It feels like coming home,” Ter Haar said of America. “Yet, there’s enough difference to make it very interesting.”
Her travels here came about through mutual email friends.
“I like to talk a lot on email,” Ter Haar said. “An active member of the New York Society of Scribes, the president, asked if I would be interested in teaching in the U.S. and she pulled it off.”
Ter Haar spent a few days in Portland with a friend and says she loved the city’s beauty and architecture. She finds American motorists much friendlier than in her native country.
“Your drivers are so courteous, so careful,” Ter Haar said.
From Sweet Home, Ter Haar will teach classes in San Francisco, L.A., Dallas, South Bend, Ind., Washington, D.C., Boston, Mass., New Jersey, New York, and Charlotte, N.C.
“I want people to gain a sense of achievement and pride from these classes,” Ter Haar said. “I want them to have a sense of pleasure in themselves and in their work. A sense of fun. Hopefully they will share it with everybody.”
Ter Haar hopes to take back “many memories as well as some of the same values as my students. I’m having a wonderful time and I’m going to take back a sense of accomplishment.”
Ter Haar says class size is limited to about 20 persons, since her style is very hands-on learning.