Reminders of Humanity by Danielle

Reminders of Humanity by Danielle - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

I consider myself lucky to have had so many wonderful teachers in my life. They have inspired, challenged, and empowered me. Many lessons have been learned throughout the course of my academic history, so at first it seemed like it would be difficult to choose a single most important one, but one lecture does stick out to me.
I signed up for AP European History my Junior year of high school because I was fairly interested in the subject but I was also interested in taking all the Advanced Placement classes my school would allow. After enrolling, I started hearing rumors about it: “It’s super easy,” “Basically a designated naptime on your schedule,” “Didn’t do anything.” I was worried about potentially wasting my time, but figured it wouldn’t be bad to have a class with a relatively easy workload on my schedule.
The first day of that class was unlike any other first day. Dr. Thorsen, soft-spoken, intellectual, careful to always choose the best words, greeted us sincerely, but quietly, from the back of his classroom. He invited us to sit and watch a ten-minute animated video on empathy, its evolution, and its place in a society. Empathy is a word I had heard and read, but not often felt. It wasn’t a concept I had internalized or fully understood. Even less had I ever thought about its place in a society. Students walked out thinking that it was a complete waste of time and had nothing to do with European history, but I felt like I had discovered a secret of life.
The next day, we assigned ourselves to teams and analyzed a piece of artwork. We talked about its purpose, its message, its legacy. At least, that’s what we were supposed to do, but we hadn’t ever thought about art that way. Before, art was décor to us. We were lost. We didn’t receive much direction that day; we were largely left to our own devices, so some students turned to their devices and whatever social media news they might flash.
Coming back to class another day, we were asked to summarize the message of an article he had printed for us. We did a bit better this time and he helped us put our thoughts into words on the board at the front of the room. At first there were five different summaries from each of the groups in the class, but we all worked together to write a final, concise, yet all-encompassing topic sentence. Once we had achieved that, Dr. Thorsen told someone to type the whole sentence into Google Search. The class looked at each other. Of course we weren’t going to find anything, what was he trying to prove?
When the search came up empty, he gracefully stepped into a monologue. He argued, that in a time when it seems our thoughts are chewed and spoon-fed to us, we only need to work a bit to think, truly think, to come up with an original response to a prompt or issue. Here we were, as a group, able to string words together in a completely new way to convey some deep and thorough meaning, which had not been replicated anywhere else on the internet. He told us we had always had the power to do this, and we can do this on our own. We can think on our own two feet. He taught us about critical thinking, standing up for our innately human worth, and what we can learn from each other’s original ideas. Again, we left the classroom knowing little more about European history than we did before, but I walked out with much more valuable knowledge.
It was not every day that we were given truths of life or secrets of humanity, and yes, the class could be lackluster at times, but I learned so much more than I had expected. I had expected to have all these facts and dates of European monarchies and their conflicts dumped on me without much use for them, but instead I became, if I’m allowed, wiser. And I did still learn a bit about history. But I learned more about the humans that lived throughout those times. I learned about the motives for colonialization and how that has completely changed some countries’ paths going into the modern age. We heard about the plights of the serfs, the tragedies of World War II. Dr. Thorsen invited a survivor of the Holocaust to speak to us about her experiences and what she does to prevent anything like that from happening again: by promoting empathy and painting tulips.
At the end of the year, I wrote Dr. Thorsen a thank you note. I thanked him for teaching me to be empathetic and to understand that even with more than 7 billion people on this planet, we are, each and every one of us, original.