English 101 class pays tribute to Tom Winter

The following was written by English 101 students in collaboration with Dr. Janet Badia.

Saturday, Sept. 16, a tragic accident took the life of Tom Winter, a freshman business major at Marshall University.

As The Parthenon reported in its Sept. 19 issue, Tom was struck by a car as he walked down the street in his hometown of Charleston.

He died at the hospital later that evening.

Tom was our classmate in English 101, and over the past few weeks we had the opportunity to get to know him, to discover the person he was and the person he hoped to be.

Faced with his death and the loss of his presence in our class, we wanted to pay tribute to Tom in The Parthenon. We hope that through this tribute the rest of the Marshall community might catch a glimpse of the person we came to know. Before sitting down to write, we talked as a class about our memories of Tom and about the things we had learned about him through our conversations together in class.

Here are just a few of things we learned: Tom loved the theater and soccer, and he thought he would like to be a politician someday. He also wanted to live a life that would allow him to help people. And, some of us learned, he longed to fall in love.

But most of what we learned about Tom we gathered, not from talking with him, but from observing him in class. You didn't need to interact with Tom for very long to know that he was friendly and personable, humble and ambitious, well-mannered and respectful, generous and always ready to help. He was also remarkably open-minded and intelligent.

But what made Tom truly exceptional was his unique ability to use all of these qualities to bring out the best in everyone around him and to make others feel important and valued.

In class, Tom showed that he wasn't afraid to look at things from other angles and perspectives, and he would often go out of his way to respect, understand and support the opinions of others.

At the same time, he wasn't afraid to push us to consider issues in more depth or to look closer at the reading we were discussing.

The last discussion we had as a class before Tom's death was about the book "Into the Wild," which tells the story of Chris McCandless, a young man, only a few years older than Tom, who died after daring to walk alone into the Alaskan wilderness.

Together, we debated the wisdom of Chris' decision and the stability of a man who would choose to follow such a dream.

Tom's comments in class and his writings about the book suggest that he understood something about Chris, that he had insight into the ambition and desire that motivated the young man to follow his vision ­ perhaps even that he intuited the fleetingness of life and the need to make the most of it.

After learning about Tom's death, it quickly became clear to us as a class that while each of us had only known Tom for a short time, he left an indelible impression on our lives.

We miss his presence in our class and we feel the loss of all that we had yet to learn from and about Tom Winter.