Teaching law

There are days when, simply put, you love your job. You come to class, see most everyone in place, you launch your topic for the day, hardly being able to contain your excitement.

My subject for today certainly remains high on the scale of bleakness: there’s virtually nothing happy to be said about enforcement of child support orders. But no matter. Blame the sunshine, the Spring Break rest, the electric quality of teaching on this day, in this mood, at this time—complete joy.

It’s worth recording this post – just to recall it on those other days, when you’re certain that you are not in a conversation with any of the students per se, but in the triangular communication between you, them, and whatever it is that they’re reading off the Net on their laptops. At those moments I feel the classroom should have a big TV screen on the back wall –sort of like the ones they have in gyms or in bars around town –with a Fox News or CNN headline banner running along the bottom, for when a student is speaking and I find I could use a momentary distraction [a reader and a law student elsewhere recently told me that in her class, when a student asks what amounts to a tangential question, you can see from where the students are sitting all the laptop screens automatically jump to email, CNN, blogs, spider solitaire etc, only to return to the notes page when the exchange is over].