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There Is Too Much Silent Disagreement in America’s College Classrooms
Respectful debate needs to make a comeback.
A student politely disagreed with me in class recently, and I was very pleased. Okay, I thought, let’s have a good debate. This student disagrees with me periodically, which is fine. It is perplexing how we can often look at similar facts and reach opposite conclusions, but this is always possible. I like to think of myself as an intelligent, reasonable, and experienced person, and I have confidence in my convictions, but I’m as human, and therefore limited, as anyone else, and I don’t rule out the possibility that I could be wrong about everything.
This particular disagreement was about the appropriateness of the title for “Chronicles of a Bubble-Tea Addict,” an article written by Jiayang Fan for the New Yorker and reprinted in The Best American Food Writing 2022. The article was assigned as reading in one of my first-year composition classes.
My position was that the title did not effectively reflect the content of the essay, because it isn’t, strictly speaking, a chronicle, and it is not really about addiction. The student disagreed, explaining how various parts of the article did relate more or less directly to those words in the title. You can decide for yourselves. Here’s a link to the article:
