centre de redaction oblige

One of my best friends, surrogate brother really, was a journalism major and had a great philosophy that's kind of similar to this topic. His motto was nothing is offensive till you take offense to it and to me this makes a crazy kind of sense. Which is funny because normally he was given to spout endless post-modernistic arguments that you could only roll your eyes at. It does take all types to make the world (and to become subject matter for student composition) and no one opinion is "right" because we all believe that what we do and how we act is "right". Or sometimes as close as circumstances will allow. I must confess that my experience is very limited with topics that seem to go out of the way to create emotionally charged sessions. For the most part, I've worked the regular run-of-the-mill subjects like responses to poems and research into Type 2 diabetes, which don't tend to cause too many struggles in morality. During those few sessions with charged topics I find it works really well to just step back from personal feelings, remember this isn't my paper and I'm not the student's instructor, and realize I have no more right to chastise the student for such beliefs then the student has to chastise me for mine. The session is purely a business arrangement and its best to keep it in an aloof corporate-like setup. However, I'm rather leery of the one paper that I'm sure to get sooner or later, the one that is sure to push buttons where, in any other set of circumstances, the panel is dead. The anti-evolution paper. This will be the real test of the "step back" approach and I rather hope it (and myself) come through on the right side of the ledger.