Artsy doesn’t have to be fartsy

My nerd membership card is at risk of being ripped in half. I might have my honorary eye glasses confiscated. I may no longer be allowed to worship His Bobbafettness. After almost two months of second semester, I’m finally ready to admit it: I’m enjoying my humanities class.

Science nerds and humanities classes aren’t supposed to mingle. If a Nerdian ventures into the City of Artsy Classes, we’re exiled from our homeland on pain of death. Or at the very least, our Star Wars action figure sets (all sealed in original mint-condition packages) will be smacked around a little and have a corner viciously folded down. But in direct defiance of the Nerd Code of Honour, I’m finding the class... well... interesting.

The class, “Individuals and Families in a Diverse society,” claims to cultivate “an awareness of and insight into students’ own personal and family development.” It also promised to teach Learning Skills.

Surely I was doomed.

But then something miraculous happened. I didn’t have the gall-bladder bored out of me. When we learned about the traditional transitions that adolescent Canadians face, I didn’t find my mind shutting down into a sanctuary of exponential equations and horizontal asymptotes.

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I’ve even gained some invaluable Learning Skills.

No, it doesn’t quite match the thrill of finding a derivative, setting it equal to the slope of a tangent, and then solving a problem in which a point off the curve of a function must be found. But if losing the right to say words like “vertices” and “polynomial” means finally learning what the hell words like, “conceptual framework,” and “occupational attainment” actually mean, then it’s totally worth it.

Unless, of course, it means my Bobba Fett is in any sort of danger.

scott.dobson.mitchell@gmail.com