What You Should Learn in the Classroom about Expressing Your Opinion (Especially in College)

Watershed moments in your life can be exaggerated I am sure through the lens of memory, but I have a vivid recollection of one such moment in my 10th-grade English class with Mr. Harrill.

English throughout junior high had been a series of grammar book exercises and what felt like an entire year of sentence diagramming in 9th grade. Then one day in Mr. Harrill’s class we had a full-class discussion.

Except for the weekly tedium of vocabulary tests, Mr. Harrill taught us that English class was about reading, writing, and thinking — often aloud. In other words, English became a place where we all explored ideas as a community in order to shape our own views of the world around us.

One day Mr. Harrill was being observed by the principal, Mr. Simpkins (his two sons, one a year ahead and one a year behind me, were friends), who just about 8 years later would be my principal as I took Mr. Harrill’s position and entered that same room as a high school English teacher.

The class quickly slipped into debate (I am not sure that was Mr. Harrill’s lesson plan) about whether or not we would serve in war if drafted. The class quickly divided into two camps — all the boys except me proclaimed their patriotic zeal for serving while I joined the girls in saying I would not serve because I rejected the concept of war.

Years later when I interviewed with Mr. Simpkins, he recalled that day, and pushed me on whether or not I was serious (Mr. Harrill had apparently explained after that class that I was prone to being the devil’s advocate in the class).

One of Mr. Harrill’s many gifts as a teacher was his ability to instill in us both passion for ideas and words as well as a sense of community; we listened and we shared. I genuinely don’t recall anyone being inappropriately upset even though I recall many of us being uncomfortable.

Another lesson came in college — where professors and classmates were incredibly smart, where professors began to define boundaries for sharing our comments in informed and credible ways.

The best thing about college for me was learning to listen and recognizing that being smart was mostly about stepping back, acknowledging your assumptions, and then moving forward grounded in evidence. Honestly, despite the popular narrative that being an English major is a wasted major, I learned much of this through the demands of literary analysis.

In short, don’t say something about a text unless you can ground your comments in the actual text.

Being a student was such a vibrant and important experience for me, I became an English teacher. As I noted above, I entered my old English classroom as the teacher in the fall of 1984 (an ominous year it seems now in the current climate of educational gag orders).

For 18 years, I committed myself to providing the same sort of experiences for my students that Mr. Harrill gave to me; it was a gift and I was determined to pay it forward.

Classes were discussion-based and my students wrote a tremendous amount. English was about ideas, and the focus was teaching my students in ways that helped them become the people they wanted to be.

Many class sessions were uncomfortable, even tense, because we confronted race/racism and religion quite often — among the many complex topics raised over and over in literature.

Students were often frustrated at each other, and several were deeply frustrated with me.

But we were a community, and my students learned the boundaries of academic discussion much earlier than I did. For many years, I had former students reach out from college to thank me for my classes and those lessons (often about their ability to write, but that was also about their ability to think in informed and complex ways).

I have now been teaching at a selective university for twenty years, since the fall of 2002.

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