I'm reluctant to offer advice to Richard on this issue of "offensive" opinions in the composition class, simply because no two incidents are the same. Sometimes postions we experience as offensive are deeply held, other times they are merely received and unexamined opinion - the unopened baggage our students bring to school. In the latter case, exposing the idea to others, as Marcy and other have suggested, can have a powerful "curative" effect. In the former case, neither we nor the other people in the class are likely to have much of an effect, especially if the "offender" feels outnumbered and cornered, which often hardens rather than softens positions. In many cases, I suspect these are passing opinions, tried on for size, designed to shock, thrilling because different or radical, and usually not carefully examined for implications. And to some students we are jailers, and their opinions are chosen to conflict with our own. (In this regard, I think we might be a bit more suspicious of those students whose opinions agree with our own, since they are often the most adept at playing "guess what teacher wants to know", or at "preaching to the choir," as Susan put it.) How would we feel if we were confronted with our own late adolescent/early adult opinions? I know I'd be deeply offended if faced with some of the opinions I held when I was 20 years old. But I am intrigued by the responsibility we all feel (or perhaps we don't ALL feel it) to change the minds of students whose opinions differ from our own, and I wonder if the problem has more to do with the role we take on in the writing (or other) classroom than it does with some sort of onus on us to improve the world. What is our place in the discourse of the classroom? Are we arbiters of taste, ideology, fact? Where are we positioned in the flow of written and spoken classroom texts? Do they flow to us? Through us? Who/what are the texts for? How do we read/hear them - that is, what is our stance toward them? Here, I think, our role as evaluators complicates the issue, as it does all our issues. I'm curious to know whether we feel the same impulse to "correct" offensive writers/speakers in the public sphere - the out-of-classroom sphere. As people-in-the-world, do we feel a responsibility towards those whose discourse offends us that is similar to the responsibility we feel as people-in-the-classroom? Do we react in a similar way? Should we? (I'm going to fail Lucien Bouchard for that offensive comment about the "white races"!) In other words, is our ideological activism in the classroom, where our power allows us to act on and enforce our ideologies, matched by a similar activism outside the classroom, or do we feel some greater need to act in the classroom because we're paid for our role there? If there is a disjuncture here between our in- and out-of-class selves, does it matter? I realize we have a particular role in the classroom, but what is it about that role that impels us to feel we must correct students' opinions before we set them loose on the (gullible?) world? Okay, okay, enough rambling. References: <[log in to unmask]>