It's been awhile since I taught a class full time. I've presented seminars for professionals, I did updates on 4th amendment law for police officers often while I was doing public entity law, but generally those seminars were an hour or two, I gave them only once in a while and I was speaking to motivated, focused professionals. Several years, and a move to Spain later, and I'm teaching two regular college courses on International Business Law. One a Masters class, the other an undergraduate course.
Now, I don't want to sound ungrateful. I needed a paying job and preferably one with some ties to my profession. Although I'm also working in a law firm here in Madrid it's only part time and I needed some additional work to keep me going. So teaching about law when I'm not in the law office seems like a pretty good gig. But it's proving to be a challenge on a couple of levels: 1) trying to make the material interesting and accessible to the students and 2) trying not to throw books at the occasional undergrad who thinks the classroom is his chance to try out for "Last Comic Standing".
My Masters class is pretty cool. It's small, only 8 students and half of those students are professional adults, so the vibe is very different. Plus I think only two of my students are from the US. The others are from Spain, Bosnia and Nigeria. So you can imagine how interesting it is to discuss International Law with people who are living a lot of these issues on a daily basis. I'm learning a lot in that class and it gives me a glimpse into why people choose academia as a profession.
My undergrad class on the otherhand, well....most of the kids are VERY prepared and great students. Despite the fact that sometimes the material is a bit dry (and the fact that I'm new at the whole professor gig) they participate in classroom discussions and seem to understand more than just the facts, but how these legal principles impact their current lives and their future lives as businessmen and women. Its the one or two kids in the class however that still think they're in High School and desperately in need of attention that are slowly killing me. Yesterday I asked a student to brief a Products Liability case which involved the company Johnson & Johnson as a defendant. After this girl briefed the case very well one of the "attention seekers" exclaimed, "did she just say Johnson & Johnson", "like, is the defendant's name Johnson"??? I stared at him for a moment while I contemplated the fact that my life really had come to this, I was actually getting paid to sit in a room with an 18 year old who still got the giggles from hearing the word Johnson because, Johnson = penis. I explained to the kid that he wouldn't have to know how to spell Johnson & Johnson on the exam and moved on, but seriously? Penis jokes? So while I'm happy to be employed, and finding some enjoyment out of teaching, some of the day to day of it is wearing me out. On the bright side, it has motivated me to send out another round of resumes. We'll see how this semester plays out and I'll decide in December whether to take another crack at the whippersnappers for the Spring semester.
On the bright side, it's fall t.v. time. When I'm not preparing the next lesson plan I've managed to catch the first episode of America's Next Top Model - which was AWESOME!! Only on ANTM will an autistic girl with a hunch back believe she can actually appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Go Tyra!
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