As an assignment, we watched the documentary Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, the title instantly catching my attention because it made me stop and think what the true meaning behind this documentary is about.  After all, “The Indians Who Rocked the World” is a phrase that really makes an impact when one first reads it.

A significant challenge facing any instructor who finds herself shifting her teaching duties from a four-year university to a two-year community college is the possibility of having to adopt new teaching styles.  As an instructor who has taught history at both El Paso Community College and The University of Texas at El Paso, I can say that at both institutions, instructors who teach humanities courses often have the same struggle in convincing students of the importance of these courses even if they are not majoring in them.

First, a walk down memory lane: I have the vivid memory of the summer before I started as a community college student.  My family and I sat at the dinner table, and because I was still a growing boy, I ate like starved German shepherd while my father, step-mother, and older sister offered their opinions about what I ought to study. I was naïve. I associated dollar signs with “business major,” and my older sister offered, “You should minor in sociology to demonstrate you have an understanding of how to work with groups of people.”

The humanities can be defined broadly as history, culture, art, music, philosophy, literature, religion, and myriad forms of expression and commentary on “the human condition.”  Humanities scholarship helps us understand who we were, are, and who we may become through methodologies that are both quantitative and qualitative, that include precision and speculation, that are visual, discursive, or auditory.