There's a third possibility: go way beyond what the professor expects and have fun with it. Use templates. Use abstract classes. Avoid multiple inheritance if possible. Use the STL and namespaces and operator overloading.

Multiple inheritance is evil. I rarely use it anyway, though sometimes it's unavoidable.

I admit that I rarely use templates, because they are compiler magic and don't always behave quite the way I expect them too.

Abstract classes, on the other hand, are a real backbone in my C++ programming. It makes things come out much cleaner, IMO.