Education & Classes in Ozark

Since 1967, Palen Music Center has been fostering the musical arts throughout Missouri with six locations stocked with instruments and staffed by musicians who offer both shopping insight and musical instruction. The center’s instrument rentals and private lessons—which are available for a variety of different instruments—give aspiring musicians a chance to explore their options before purchasing an instrument of their own. And for those ready to invest, Fender guitars, Tama drums, Roland keyboards, and a wide array of other instruments are kept stocked at each of the shop’s locations.

After years floating between jobs in a search for fulfillment, Terry Scroggins discovered his passion for photography in 1984 while shooting football games with a loaned professional camera and a single flash. As he expanded his skills to include subtly lit indoor portraits, he began traveling throughout the region and later the country to snap subjects from ball teams to bands, prom-goers, and beauty queens. A skilled communicator, Terry could deftly organize teams of athletes into position for group portraits, even when he and they had no languages in common—an issue that almost caused difficulties during the fast-pitch softball Women's World Championship, in which 27 countries were represented.

After years on the road, Terry eventually settled down to restructure his business to accommodate emerging digital methods. Today his portrait studio hosts carefully posed photo shoots and classes in everything from lighting strategies to photoshopping a unicorn horn onto the family dog.

The staff members at Sylvan Learning's numerous study facilities understand that each child learns differently. Therefore, they don’t try to implement a uniform tutoring system; instead, they design custom lesson programs based on the results of standardized testing, diagnostic tools, and one-on-one interviews.

Tutors work with students from kindergarten through grade 12, illuminating topics ranging from basic reading and writing to remembering complex algebraic formulas without having them tattooed on your chest. Many of Sylvan’s instructors work in local schools, so they are intimately familiar with common curricula and understand how to gear lessons toward optimal results. After-school and summer classes can ready high-schoolers for the rigors of the ACT or the SAT, or they can help students to wow college-admissions officers with their superior essay-writing skills.

Large windows admit cascades of light, which spill across RSVPaint’s exposed-brick walls and straw-colored hardwood floors. The whisper of brushes against canvases often fills the studio, which hosts a schedule of painting classes led by instructors with experience as professional artists and degrees in fine art. Pupils tote along bottles of beer or wine to most sessions, and RSVPaint provides glasses, bottle openers, corkscrews, and a miniature wine fridge. Glasses jingle together to punctuate proud sighs, elicited by freshly painted masterpieces or accurate guesses as to what one will look like as a fruit bowl in a future life. Clutching new paintings, guests hang supplied aprons back up and begin considering where to display their creations.