It's like playing to a black church, Bauman says later about the call-and-response nature of the Venture class. What surprised her the most, she says, was the reverence of the students for learning, their exuberance about every new idea. Chiaroscuro, Mannerism, Vermeer: "Wow."

Sometimes Barbra Moeller arrives late to class, limping on her cane. Moeller is 44, the single mother of three. She attended one year of college after high school — child development and family relations classes, because that's what her husband told her to take, and in fact she says she rarely made a choice of her own for the first 25 years of her life. But in late 2001 she and her children ran away, a decision that found them living in their car as the new year rolled around.

"One night I parked near some trees in Liberty Park," she remembers about a cold February night when she and her children scrunched down into their Hyundai. A policeman's flashlight woke them later, and they were told to move on: No homeless allowed in the park during the Olympics, he said. For the next week, the family slept halfway between Salt Lake City and Tooele, the four of them cramped and freezing in the tiny car. Moeller was working in a 7-Eleven then, her very first job ever. At night, before they fell asleep, they would defrost frozen burritos on the car's heating vents.

Like many of the Venture students, Moeller navigates through a life that is full of compounding troubles. When she was in her mid-30s, she was diagnosed with lupus, and she's been on continuous chemotherapy for more than eight years. Chemo-sabe, she and her children call the life-saving treatments, a nod to the Lone Ranger's faithful friend.

Moeller's pastor told her about the Venture program, which immediately made her think, "I could learn things to teach my children, so their life would be better than mine." Still, she wondered if she wasn't fooling herself that she could do the work. That's a running theme among the Venture students, reinforced for years by parents and teachers and admissions officers who said, "You're not smart enough."

When Bauman describes what the students were like back in September, she remembers their lack of confidence, their fear and fragility, and their inability to make eye contact. "Some were actually shaking," she says.

In December, Bauman takes the class to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Standing in front of a piece by Jean-Honore Fragonard, she asks, "What kind of painting are we looking at here?"

"Rococo," answers Charlene Taul.

And so it goes, from room to room. Neoclassical, Impressionist, Abstract. See, Bauman says. "You can go into any museum in the world, whether you've seen the paintings before or not, and talk about them."