In my senior AP English class in high school, I was obliged to read The Natural by Bernard Malamud. I didn’t like the movie as a kid, and I sure as hell didn’t like the thinly metaphoric, morally thick book. Sorry sports fans, it just didn’t grab me. But my teacher Mr. McKenzie loved it. And I loved him. Not in that way. He looked like Mark Twain and is seriously one of the sweetest men on the planet. He introduced me to authors that changed my life and he’s a big part of why I enjoy writing at all. So, I felt kind of bad for hating it. Ungrateful even.
After we read it, he started an open class discussion on what we thought about the book: theme, mood, character development, etc. He started us off by giving his thoughts, which turned into a 5-minuet dissertation on a book he was passionate about. I was taken aback. He wrapped it up by saying, “… but that’s just my opinion. What do you guys think?” And so help me; he genuinely cared to hear opposing and varying opinions, in hopes to learn something from us. A hope as passionate as the one he had for that lame book. This tempered the negative opinion I gave about The Natural. It didn’t change my mind about it, but I did learn something about trusting the passionate expertise of others while the object in question I find to be crap.
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