Am I allowed to…? / Is it okay to…?

Try rewording questions like these. What are you really asking?

For starters, be very careful with verbal constructions that infantilize you as the speaker. Reread the questions here and think about what their tone says about their speaker’s maturity.

In English classes, from the largest class policy to the smallest comma, never follow any rule without understanding why you’re following it. And at the same time: never break any rule without understanding why the rule was placed there.

In either case, part of your job in the humanities is to search out, and analyze, the reasons why something is the way it is. Our classes are rarely about being able to rattle off facts and truths you’ve memorized; they nearly always demand comprehension and analysis—down to every corner of class material, we are only teaching it in the first place in the hopes that you’ll think critically about it.

So rather than asking what’s “allowed,” ask why, how, or what if. Ask during class discussion, ideally.

Questions about what is “allowed” or “okay” sometimes signal that a student doesn’t understand key differences between high school and university. In high school, if you follow the rules perfectly, that’s usually enough to get you an A. In all university classes, you are expected to innovate and be proactive.

In a work of undergraduate humanities scholarship (e.g. a class essay), if it only produces what the professor expects, will pretty much fail—or it should. In university English classes, we work hard to establish a complex and relevant interchange of ideas.  At the core of my teaching philosophy is the encouragement that you transgress: for what I hope are obvious reasons, an authority figure cannot tell you how to transgress or innovate.

To reduce that complex work to a juvenile set of rules and commands—what is allowed, what one is supposed to do—will put you in the wrong mindset about how to approach classwork.

These questions are more often deceptive, anyway—what the asker is usually trying to do is take out verbal insurance. The student wants verbal confirmation from the professor that a choice the student is making is “allowed”—and thus, by a bit of faulty logic, the professor will be unable to deduct any points from the student’s mark.

It doesn’t work that way. You can’t “ensure” your mark preemptively—you’ll simply have to produce, and stand by, quality classwork.