Sometimes I wish I had never stumbled upon the mises institute. It would have saved me a huge amount of frustration. I could just sit in my chair and zone out like all the rest of the students, and regurritate information for the tests.
Hahaha. You’re not alone. Parallels have been drawn to finding the Austrian school and the Matrix (specifically, in whether one should choose the red pill or the blue pill). You’re not alone.
Anyway, I’ve respectfully challenged him on quite a few things so far, and intend to do so more in the future.
This is what I did. I asked critical questions carefully, without too many loaded words, and politely and (even though my teacher and I didn’t resolve all of our arguments in agreement) I feel that I earned his respect and I didn’t make an “enemy.” I was always careful to not persist in an argument for too long (otherwise, one can appear as “that guy”) and make a nuisance of myself in class- I always “chose” my battles (this way, whenever another student felt uncertain in a particular lesson, they would approach me for clarification of what the teacher said and would feel comfortable when I offer my perspective when they seemed interested in it).
I know exactly what you mean when you mention the dilemmas of tests and “not knowing” how to answer a question. Some memborable disputes include the ordinal nature of marginal utility (seriously, utils? even the textbook we used said that utils are made up immeasurable things), indifference curves, the cardinal nature of consumer/producer surplus presented in class, as well as the high prices of gas. Fun times.