All's Fair in Love and Writing Skills Development

How opinionated should a teacher be? We wonder this every time a potentially "loaded" topic comes up in a classroom.

Case in point: Today we were discussing paragraph development. To get the conversation started, the Solipsist wrote this sentence on the board:

"Barack Obama is the president of the United States."

(Thankfully, this did not seem to come as news to anyone.)

We went on to say that this sentence, while true, would not be a good topic sentence for a paragraph. We asked the class to discuss why it was not a good topic sentence and then to propose alternatives. We established the "why" fairly quickly. (It's too "narrow": In and of itself, there's nothing about that sentence that "screams out" for support.) Then we got into a discussion of what might make a good revision.

At first, students struggled with this. We got responses like, "Barack Obama is the first black president of the U.S." or "Barack Obama is the 44th president of the U.S."--all things that suffer from the same problem of "narrowness." We explained that students should try to make a statement with which someone could conceivably argue. Finally, someone came up with "Barack Obama is a better president than George W. Bush."

Now, that's a good topic sentence. Not because we agree with it, but because it provides a specific focus and because someone could conceivably disagree: Presumably John McCain would disagree. We assume Bush himself would disagree, but since he never reads the papers, he may not even know that Obama is the president.

And, you see, there's the rub. We can't SAY things like that in class. Can we? It's so hard to avoid partisanship. We did mention fact that it was likely that--in this area, at least (the Bay Area of California)--this statement would be largely uncontroversial. We think it was OK to say that. But when we ventured that the general Bay-Area-response to this statement would be a resounding "Duh!" we fear we may have been out of bounds.

Obviously, teachers have opinions, just like anybody else. And in our case, we assume our opinions are probably in sync with those of the majority of our students. But there's that "assumption" again. And even if we're right, what does that do to the small minority of students who may feel differently? Do we alienate the one conservative student who attends a community college just north of San Francisco? Do we need to bend over backwards to accommodate that student's feelings?

We do try. But there's still a part of us that thinks anyone ill-informed enough to hold such out-of-step, right wing views needs to have their horizons expanded, if not their heads examined.

D'oh! There we go again!