So, one thing it is critical for you to understand about how I became the person I am today is that I was raised as a staunch, fundamentalist, evangelical Christian. I’m talking Vacation Bible School, going to church no less than three times a week, summer camps the minute I was old enough to spend a week without my parents. When I was in high school, I organized a revival celebration that continued annually for years after I graduated and left town. Being a Christian was more than just a thing I did on Sundays; it was a core component of my identity.
When I got to the University of Arizona, I had a singular educational experience that significantly changed the course of my life.
As a freshman, I took the General Education course The Universe and Humanity: Origin and Destiny, taught at the time by a contributor to the Hubble Telescope and the Chairman of the Congressional Committee for Space Exploration. The class was enormous; there must have been five hundred students in attendance. On the first day of class, the professor asked us all how old the universe was, and, being a Biblical literalist who had watched an entire video series on how the earth was actually covered in water in high school, I raised my hand hand boldly declared, “10,000 years.”
The professor said, “I know where you’re coming from, please come see me after class.”
I proceeded through the class with a kind of ethical disobedience, answering every question as if the Bible were literal. Upon the advent of the final, I went to the professor’s office and said I objected to the final on account of having a different frame of reference for reality.
The professor asked what my major was, and I said Classics, because I had always been fascinated with the great civilizations to come before ours. The professor said he also had a degree in Classics and said in lieu of the final, I could write a two page paper for him in Latin on Logical Positivism.
Writing that paper changed my entire life, if not immediately. The idea that beliefs should be built on things you have tangible evidence for was an insidious concept that wore away at my fundamentalist apologetics over years. Eventually, it served as the ramp that led me out of the church and into a passionate humanism.
Ever since that moment in a random General Education class, I striven to be that kind of teacher, who, instead of strictly adhering to a curriculum, sees what a student actually needs to learn and pushes them in that direction.
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