I have found that Adjunct teaching aspiring Attorneys at Law Schools refreshing and revitalizing. There is a hunger that young law students often have and sharing the wisdom of experience and hard earned insights of legal practice in and outside of the court room allows them to learn and me to reflect on what I've learned.
This past spring I taught Interviewing and Counseling at the University of Tennessee Winston College of Law. That was the second law school course I’ve taught. The law school course I taught was an upper level writing course at Lincoln Memorial University Duncan School of Law. I was invited to teach that course again, but opted to focus on law practice for a while.
This past semester, teaching Interviewing & Counseling, was a very different experience, though both were positive in their own ways. Interviewing & Counseling is a simulation course with actors and multiple scenarios that emphasized reflective practice, balancing self-awareness, active listening, empathy and compassion. It was very important to encourage and insist that students lean into the tension of the moments they were faced with while upholding ethic principles in complex and sometimes emotionally charged scenarios with fact witness and client interviews. These scenarios put these students into situations dealing with multiple different areas of law so that they were all put off balance at on point or another and no student with a certain type of Externship or Clerkship would have an undue advantage all semester long. I encouraged my students, in the Spirit of Theodore Roosevelt to dare boldly and enter the arena, learn from your experiences, dare boldly and remember that it’s not the critic that counts. If you aren't familiar with that quote, it is worth reading, and re-reading. My father drilled this quote into me and my siblings growing up, but even Brené Brown has recognized the significance of this quote and delved into its meaning. Read the quote below, and check out her talk about Why Your Critics Aren't The Ones Who Count.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
—Theodore Roosevelt
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910