If that seems good to you, please stay out of education. Also, I’m not your friend, please don’t call me that. It’s patronizing. I brought it up because it was relevant to my greater point and was an amusing anecdote about the wrong way to teach dated literature, not because I’m still stuck on a minor event a decade ago. I’ve had far worse experiences with teachers that actually were formative, in the sense that they were traumatic. Traumatizing kids isn’t “pushing them,” it’s just hurting them in their formative years. That teacher didn’t traumatize me, but for someone less confident socially or in their opinions, it easily could have been. Imagine forcing a shy, neurodivergent kid to argue against 20+ other people for 45 minutes about something as divisive as human nature and morality, while simultaneously shutting down any discussion of the author’s racism, which is very relevant to that discussion. That teacher didn’t know me at all. That could’ve been me.