Higher education and I, redux.

I thought I had all this stuff nailed. College is a breeze, just find out what the teacher wants, and give it to him/her. Except that critical thinking is different. Here, I am supposed to think for myself, right? Well, right, and wrong, too. Because I still have to think like the teacher, too, to accomplish my goals, which include a good grade. Our first paper, and there are many in this class, was a short analysis of Mark Twain's essay The Turning Point of My Life. In it, he theorizes that we have no free will, that our lives are predicted by two indicators, temperament and circumstance. All men are watches; some are fancier than others, but watches anyway. Wind a man up, and he will do what he does. He bases his argument on his own experience and extends that out onto the rest of us. Well, it's humorous and pretty pompous, too. And not true, at least not in my experience. The whole thing hinges on temperament being both inborn and unchangeable, the way old Mark's apparently was. Mine was so deeply buried in defense mechanisms, the poor thing was a dead duck before I was five. And a lot of this going-back-to-school thing is yet another attempt to find out who I was supposed to be in the first place, before I had to be everything everybody else expected me to be. And I am still finding that everyone else has an idea of that, still. I actually said what I thought in this paper, and after Joel gave us a little pep-talk about how character-building it is to get a D on your first paper as I sat there cringing, I was relieved to see that he gave me a B+. This was because, despite the explicit instructions not to include any opinion, he could see that my argument was a "thinly veiled criticism". Well, duh. It's critical thinking, right?