Informal Writing #7

Informal Writing #7

Belinda and Gordon have arranged to meet at a small café in the middle of a bustling city. They decided that they needed to meet in order to discuss the topic of how important humanities classes are in college. Our skit starts as Gordon arrives at the café two minutes late, with Belinda patiently waiting outside against the wall.

Belinda: Gordon, nice to finally meet you in person! I was worried that you would not be able to make it.

Gordon: Well, I’m sorry to be fashionably late. To reiterate, you wanted to discuss the importance of the humanities in the curriculum of education, yes?

B: Yes, or perhaps how they are not so important. Let’s go get a table outside, it’s quite nice out.

G: Yes I would enjoy eating in the sun. However, let us not start our discussion by depreciating the humanities. They are incredibly important in everyday life.

B: Well I hope you can back that up with some facts, because I experienced firsthand how useless the humanities can be.

G: I- Yes I intend to do so.

There is a silence as the two move towards a table near the corner of the sectioned-off eating area. They sit down and a waiter comes to take their drink orders.

G: I’ll take seltzer water with a few drops of lemon-lime, my good sir.

B: I’ll have a Coke.

The waiter leaves and they begin their discussion again.

G: So you said that you “experienced firsthand” the uselessness of humanities? Please do tell.

B: Well, I was always successful in math, but I always felt that my career would be in the arts. I thought I would be an interpreter or something, but then when I would go for job interviews and they would say “yes you can speak foreign languages but what else do you do?” and I would have nothing to say. Nothing I had studied was bringing me anywhere in life. But then, in an advertising agency, I was given some tasks with companies like IBM and HP. It was then that I learned that I had fallen into a stereotype of girls loving art and not the technologies.

G: Well, yes that is a common stereotype. But don’t you see? All these schools nowadays are promoting technology and science! We need the humanities in our lives in order to call ourselves human. Thankfully, the core humanities have remained through the years: English and History. Without those we would be monochromatic in skill. We don’t need only people that excel in Math and Science in this world, we need a balance! As a sum, we need our country to be a fully artistic and logical unit.

B: Don’t you understand that you can be an artist in your own way as an engineer or programmer?

G: That may be, but there must remain a balance in society. We cannot have everyone shift to engineering or programming jobs. We need historians, writers, and actors too! Earlier you said something about the stereotype of girls only participating in the arts and that you wanted to break that.

B: Yes, I believe that females should feel comfortable in the environment that men currently dominate.

G: Well if every female suddenly went into engineering, then the majority of our population would be mathematicians and scientists, would it not?

B: Yes, but why does that matter? Like I said, you can be really artistic as a programmer. In fact, I’m teaching my daughter now how important it is to be technologically savvy, and I want her to grow up to become another person who can express the arts through the sciences.

G: But it isn’t right that way. We need the core humanities to survive. That is what we are arguing about. Not whether or not you can express your feelings through some form of math or science. We need people that have studied History and English.

B: And there will always be people like that, but like I said, the world is shifting to technology, and it is becoming more and more important to be able to do math and science in our everyday environment. I stick by my claim that spending four years studying foreign language was worthless.

G: Suit yourself, but I still stick by my beliefs that the humanities are core in today’s world.

B: Then this argument has gone nowhere, so I’m leaving.

G: Fine, be that way. I’ll stay here and eat something.

B: Fine.

Belinda now leaves the table and exits the café area and walks to her parked car down the road. Gordon receives his seltzer from the returning waiter and drinks it quietly as the set fades.