Yes, the typo cracks me up too in a PhD professor. I guess he just had a zillion less stellar papers to read/grade and was getting on with it. I was at an online university and though all the professors are required to be PhD, they're all part-time/online also and have other, "real" jobs so the school teaching is an add-on in their lives. My 20th Century European History professor was wonderful because he worked for "the" would-be secret government agency (they need historians to understand what's going on with a country/region). He was in Germany when the Iron Curtain fell (he was a Germany "expert" so I wrote his papers on Germany, which I had a lot of difficulty with and he liked the paper/thesis but knocked my knowledge of German history but said it did not "detract" from the thesis :-) I do try to make it entertaining for my teachers and myself both; write to their strengths; I figure in order to make points with them I have to really learn the stuff? And, it does help that I was older and more experienced (in my 50's) and had no axes to grind or didn't have anything (job) riding on the outcome, etc.

My husband has always gone his own way/against the grain :-) He tells a hilarious story of his paper in college on Robert Frost's poem, "A Road Not Taken" that he (he's an engineer so thought English Lit was a waste) argued against; how can you be "against" Robert Frost? LOL.

You are in school 100% for you! You'll graduate, get a job, etc., do it your way. It's a great exercise in expressing your "voice" and gaining confidence in it (so you don't "freeze" and are unable to write?).

The devil's advocate paper I wrote that I liked was for my Chinese history professor (he wrote a scholarly paper with someone else and I used that as a source but argued with a point they made :-) and in that I argued how wonderful Mao was (for the Chinese)!