A decisive decade
On May 18, 2015, I stepped into a small seminar room at ASU ready to begin my first day of teaching.
It was certainly unexpected considering that a year earlier I had been preparing for the California bar exam. It had been a gut-wrenching summer on the home front. Wolves at the door came sniffing for blood, so to speak. In July, 2014, I had endured the three-day exam confident it would not work out.
That year 8,504 people sat for the exam and the pass rate was 48.6%. It was the first time in almost a decade that the rate had fallen below 50%. It was tough to say the least. Despite the odds, on December 12, 2014, I was sworn in to practice law on top of a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
And yet, a little over five months later, I was looking over a lesson plan.
The argument is valid that I wasn’t practicing law. However, I was using what I had learned as a lawyer in a new profession I was trialing. I had entered graduate school with only vague notions of becoming an academic. Frankly, I wasn’t that bothered by titles and had no idea what tenure-track entailed. I was there to learn history. I had needed something in which I found joy. Studying history had been the last time I felt joy. So here I was ready to keep learning what brought me joy.
Oh, and I kind of liked teaching.
I was preparing to teach a seminar course. I had told the Department that despite graduate students not being able to teach until they pass their comprehensive exams, there should be an exception made because I had a law degree.
To my surprise, an exception was made.
Despite graduate students being assigned to 100 or 200 level introduction courses, I decided I would like to teach a special topics 300 level course. Those seem more interesting, less mundane.
For reasons that remain a mystery, this too, was approved.
But I wasn’t going to teach just any 300 level course. I would only teach something that was interesting to me. After looking over the topics list of courses offered, nothing stood out. Call this the seeming arrogance of someone in a second career before a first one was ever even attempted.
I decided I would teach a 300 level special topics course of my own making. I called it “Constitutional Rights of Criminal Defendants.”
My thinking had been that after learning the reality of the 4th, 5th, and 6th amendments in law school, non-lawyers should know what rights they actually had. It was a first foray into an intellectual obsession to explore the disjunction between theory and reality. As a graduate student, the ideal audience would be undergrads who may treat boundaries of legality more flexibly than perhaps more cautious members of the general public.
How or why any of this was approved, I’ll never know.
One student reflected after the course, “I think this class helps students come away with an open mind to asking questions and, even uniquely, with a new willingness to think about how the current justice system we have can be improved.”
It began an obsession.
Designing my first ever course as a teacher, using my own resources, and creating topics of my own choosing, spoiled me. It was fun to do. I figured it would always be like this. And like this was pure joy. I enjoyed it so much that I promised myself I would never teach courses in any traditional way using traditional topic selections or readings. I would seek to transcend. I would question everything.
It’s a terrible habit to embrace so early in a career.
Lesson resources are never satisfactory. No time limit can ever be placed on lesson planning. Reading is endless. Structures can be improved. Course content continually changed. When ‘instructional designers’ have dared to cross paths, they were most impolitely dismissed for lack of subject matter expertise. Casual conversations bore the mind. Social interactions are avoided. The price paid for the habit seems high.
Yet, a decade later the promise remains mostly true. Even when exam syllabi propagate varieties of western propaganda, it behooves me to counter. After all, if one has access to sources from the east, one should use them in classes dominated by the west to promote critical thinking, right?
Origins is likely a result of a decade of thinking outside the box when it came to course content and materials. Having never started in a box it’s hard to imagine any other reality. In the long run, it’s probably better this way. After all, learning to teach while embracing freedom may have been the greatest gift of a decisive decade.
