HumTut

Of my actual classes, only one that semester was even remotely challenging.  Humanities Tutorial, or HumTut as it was called, was a combined English and Philosophy class that lasted an entire year.  Enrollment for it was hand selected from the top students, and it was deliberately the most intense course in the school.  It was also the first step into the new "Honors" program that they were starting that year.  The class was taught be a team of three professors, and much of the lecture phase was actually a dialog between them.  We had four papers to write each semester, on topics of our choice, which was very open ended, but they had to be edited by our classmates, with various revisions submitted.  I did my first one on Sun Tzu's Art of War.  I was more concerned about getting it edited than writing, both because I didn't know how long to expect that to take, and because it involved asking someone else for their help.

When I finished my first draft a week early, I took it over to the girls next door.  Four of the five of them were in the class, so I figured I would be able to get one of them to review it for me.  No one else in my room was in that class, not even close.  KC was sort of the ringleader of the group, and her reaction caught me a little off guard.  "I hate you!"  "Uh, come again?"  "I hate you!  You’re already done?"  "Uh, yeah…sorry?"  None of them had even started yet, so it was a huge weight over their heads.  In hindsight, the best response would have been "I love you too," which would have put a stop to the hate comments, that I later recognized were her way of showing affection.  But I was nowhere near being able to joke around about things like that with a girl, especially one as attractive as she was.  She did a pretty good job of giving me feedback on it, and it soon became apparent that beyond being good looking, she was quite intelligent.

I slowly became friends with her and the rest of her roommates, at least to the degree that I was capable of being friends with girls at that point.  They were also involved in student government, and KC was one of the people I would have lost that Senate race to.  She was from Littleton CO, and had survived the Columbine massacre back in high school.  She had a boyfriend back in Colorado, and eventually confided in me that she was planning to transfer away from CLU at the end of the year, because it was a joke, academically speaking.  I agreed with that assessment, but I had recognized that getting into it, so I wrote her a letter over spring break encouraging her to reconsider that plan.

I have no idea if that had any influence on her choices, but shortly after we returned, there was a field trip with HumTut, to the Getty Art museum.  I ended up riding down there with her and a few others, and learned over the course of that conversation that she had broken up with her boyfriend, and decided to stay at CLU.  That was quite the revelation, but at that point I was not prepared to take advantage of that opportunity.  A number of other students who valued academics left by the end of the year, but she stayed.

HumTut was the source of a number of other perspective changing epiphanies.  At one point the professor asked, “What is the meaning of life?”  By the end of class the discussion had concluded that the answer was relationships.  I find this to be accurate, even from a Christian perspective, just with a special focus on one particular relationship.  I had never really seen things that way before, instead aiming to live a productive and full life.  It has taken awhile to figure out how to align my practical decisions with that perspective, but I am getting there.  It has only been ten years, right?