Teaching Law, Learning French
by
Susan B. Apel

I've been teaching law for twelve years. In struggling to keep myself and my students interested, I have read, reflected, and experimented, diagnosed, and evaluated.

I've talked with students, practitioners, other professors, and, on occasion, myself. All of these activities have been useful. Quite fortuitously, however, the best thing I've done was to audit a course in introductory French.

For the teacher like myself whose own law school memories have begun to dim, who (finally) has gotten to the point where she feels she has mastered her subject matter and technique, and for whom the classroom has become a comfortable place that holds no terror, I recommend a temporary exchange of roles.

Put aside the persona of the confident professor, with years of teaching and practice experience, and become, for three hours a week, the student. And not the dean's list student, either. Study something that has always interested you, but at which you don't excel. For me, speaking French was a long-time dream. When I began to study it, I realized that a thick tongue and a tin ear were not exactly assets.

Traveling between my professor and student roles gave me a much greater insight into the feelings and behavior of my students. I thought I understood, even sympathized, with students who sit in the back row, avoid eye contact, want to say the answer but aren't sure they understand the question.

In my French student role, I, the formerly "A" student from kindergarten on, found myself dismayed when the chairs in the room were arranged in a semi-circle so as to eliminate the back row. I rehearsed my answers in my head before I raised my hand and, when I didn' t know the answer, was relieved when the professor's eyes looked to the other side of the room. Most of all, despite the fact that I have come to think of myself as an adult person who does not require approval to sustain her well-being, I was ecstatic when the professor smiled, nodded, or, wonder of wonders, said "Good!" after I uttered "C'est moi."

Back in my own classroom, my sympathy turned into empathy. Feeling ridiculously like Bill Clinton, I wanted to say "I feel your pain" to the students who tried hard to look elsewhere when I asked a question. I, too, knew what it was like to be called on, have someone speak in a foreign language, and want an answer. While I had never seen myself as being stingy with positive reinforcement, I gained a heightened awareness of how powerful a simple nod of the head can be. Moreover, I experienced that awful, difficult-to-admit-to comparison of myself to others, who, it seemed to me, probably dreamed in French and had the conditional and imperfect tenses for breakfast.

A couple of things saved me. One was that nothing important rode on the quality of my performance. I was, thank God, already happily employed. I was there in the most voluntary of senses, purely for the fun of it.

But I wondered: What if I had been, like most of my classmates, 18 or even 21 years old? What if I felt as if my fate were inextricably bound to achieving in a course in which my answers were more often wrong than right?

For those who would like to skip the pain and, upon reading this, might say to themselves that they can imagine all of these feelings without signing on for the rigors of becoming an actual student, I say I once thought so, too. Imagining the feelings and experiencing them are two entirely different things, however. Drawing from my insights from clinical teaching, it's the difference between imagining how a lawyer might feel conducting her first deposition and actually doing it. My advice is that you don't cheat yourself out of the authentic experience.