Checking Your Beliefs at the Classroom Door
             As a first year college student I came to the University with expectations of learning great things, little did I know that in order to achieve this wisdom that I seek, I would have to endure having everything I have ever believed in ripped apart. My professors have challenged almost everything that I have learned and believed to be true in my life up to this point. They have taken simple events and beliefs, made me look at them with a more difficult view, and have taken some events that I thought were devastating and made them look very trivial. As I talk to students and professors on campus, it seems to be the consensus that this is how teachers are supposed to teach; they feel it is our teachers' responsibility to make us think outside the box of right and wrong.
             Well if they are supposed to teach us to learn in a different way then why do so many people have such a hard time with teachers bringing their beliefs into the classrooms with them? I seemed to get the feeling from some of my fellow students that it was all right for teachers to teach this way as long as they did not have to sit and listen to these different points of view, well I find that very close minded. However, I can see if a student was very meek, this type of teaching would not be a very good environment for them to get the most out of an education, that in college, they are paying for. "Many graduate programs are geared to train young scholars in rigorous thinking, defined as the ability to launch and field verbal attacks" (Tannen 266). That sums up, for the most part, how I have been taught in college. Why use the word "attack", could Tannen not come up with a better word or is it the effect of the word that makes the whole statement ring true.
             We use attacks in every form of communication in our lives and it has become an acceptable way to get what we want. It is also a long...