What is the controlling idea in the paragraph -   1my introduction to school was unpleasant at best.  2my first-grade teacher's name was miss spencer, and was she ever mean.  3she pulled her hair back from her face and put it in a tight bun.  4 her mouth was down-turned, and she had permanent creases between her eyes from scowling all the time.  5the classroom, too, looked unfriendly.  6it was as neat as a pin, with a locked bookcase in one corner and a paddle on miss spencer's desk; this was long before corporal punishment was banned.  7the perfectly formed alphabet letters on the blackboard also suggested order and discipline.  8as threatening as my teacher and her classroom were, nothing was worse than the end of the school day.  9we students would line up (neatly, of course) to go to our buses.  10then, on our way out, we had to extend our palms, and miss spencer would pop us with a ruler according to how bad we had been that day.  11it's a wonder any of us ever came back the next day!

"character is what you are in the dark." dwight lyman moody, in this very witty quotation of his, states we act and think differently when we are "in the dark", that is, when the spotlight is not on us and everyone can see us and consequently judge us. when reading, we tend to be sympathetic to some characters and their dilemmas. by being so, we are saying to ourselves that we agree with those characters' acts and choices, even if they are morally questionable if we have common sense in mind. dwight lyman moody's quotation applies very well to "crime and punishment", by   19th century russian writer fiodor dostoyevsky. raskolnikov, the main character, a former law student who spends his days reflecting upon life and its misery, draws a fatal conclusion: mankind is divided in two main categories: ordinary and extraordinary people. the first are the ones who lead a run-of-the-mill existence and are full of imperfections; the latter are the ones who are spiritually superior, the ones who always know better, and have the right to judge the ordinary ones, as well as eliminate them if for common good. raskolnikov considers himself as belonging to the extraordinary category and decides to kill an old lady who is a money lender and in whose house he rents a small room. raskolnikov compares himself to napoleon, who had the undeniable right to execute tons of people during the war in order to save his nation. of course what the main character decides to do is a horrendous crime, but as readers we feel it is the right thing for him to do, since the victim is a mean old woman who only thinks about money and keeps humiliating her younger sister. what one experiences is a mixture of sympathy and empathy for the character, even though he decides to commit homicide, which is not at all accepted or tolerated by civilized citizens. however, since readers are "in the dark", they allow themselves to feel in ways they would probably never dare to confess to anyone, no matter how nasty or vicious a character can be. after all, they are just reading and doing no harm. in other words, readers are in the dark and can be who they are without being judged.