I was just reminiscing the other day with a friend about our third period Humanities class back in our last year of high school.  We considered each other to be cultivated enough individuals and we thought it would be great to take a class that involved different aspects of philosophy, literature, history, religion, art and music.

The first day of class we were surprised that we would have two instructors in the course.  One was a crazy orchestra conductor sort and the other taught us the literature and history aspect, which from day one we should have kept track of how many times the phrase “Greco / Roman period” was uttered from her mouth.  Our teachers were so impassioned by humanities that they were less hard on grading than they were about our learning experience. 

Our class took turns between sitting in an art room and the choir room, depending on what we were learning about that day.  And, oh, how they wanted us to read.  They passed out stacks upon stacks of photocopied book pages, which was probably about the height of three or four thick textbooks.  As the year progressed we received more photocopied handouts and in total students probably had to read the equivalent of seventy-five books for the year.  I swear I’m not exaggerating.

We watched glorified slideshows of statues and artwork thousands years old.  We read Dante’s Inferno and argued endlessly about the circles and cantos.  We squinted during Donizetti’s Don Pasquale from the nosebleed section of the Lyric Opera House.  I enjoyed hearing a frenetic piano at a symphony matinee where I was stuck sitting next to a ninety-four year old woman who was quite certain that she did not enjoy the frenetic noises.  The class read E.M. Forrester’s A Passage to India while I didn’t read a word of the damned thing and still haven’t, in fact.  Perhaps I would have, had I realized that the test on the book would be entirely filled with essay questions.

We went on a “houses of worship” tour of Chicago where we visited the Holy Name Cathedral, a synagogue and a small Buddhist temple where I’m sure my class expected to see some little old Tibetan man shuffling around but instead were greeted by a middle aged Caucasian mechanic.  I’m guessing the temple probably thought that teenagers may be more comfortable with someone a little more outspoken than a monk.  The last stop on the road to religion was the Baha’i House of Worship, a beautiful building in Wilmette, which took thirty-three years to construct.  I had driven past the building many times but had never been inside and was shocked to find that the majestic dwelling inside housed row upon row of bright orange seventies-style chairs. 

My most embarrassing moment in Humanities came on a train ride back from a field trip in the city when my friend and I were sitting on the Metra across from our teacher who told me that before I joined her class she had remembered me from the previous year’s prom where she had chaperoned and who I had arrived with the none other than the biggest dork on campus.