Whenever I lecture, I put together a PowerPoint of different pictures emphasizing one point or another I am trying to make. A few years ago, I put up a picture of a clown to go along with my statement that "No one you actually want to be friends with thinks you're a bozo if you mess up when you are called on in class. They're just happy they weren't the ones called on." After the lecture, a student came up and asked if it would be possible to add a "trigger warning" if I was going to put up any more clown pictures.
At first, I honestly thought the student was just messing with me and possibly trying to make some political statement about the validity of "trigger warnings" or something. I quickly realized he wasn't. Apparently, he was just really scared of clowns.
It would have been very easy for me to blow off the student's request or make some comment about living in the real world or toughening up if he expected to be a decent lawyer. I could completely understand someone thinking that I should have done exactly that and that there would have been some educational value in me doing so. I didn't have any more clown pictures on any of my other slides for the entire year, so it was basically a non-issue.
Still, I went back to my office without really saying much of anything and thought about it. At heart, I thought the idea of a "trigger warning" for clowns was goofy and probably devalued the entire idea of a warning for things or concepts that might actually be deserving of some kind of warning. But then I wondered why exactly I thought so? Was I simply being arrogant in thinking that a trigger warning for clowns was dumb? Was this an isolated weird case or the beginning of some slippery slope where I had to warn people about everything? If I didn't honor the request, why wasn't I honoring it? By honoring it, was I handing over power to the student that I shouldn't give him? Did I really have a good reason or was I simply choosing not to listen? Had I reached the age where I'm utterly convinced of the halcyon days of my own youth and thought that this generation should just freaking grow up and get off my lawn?
When I was in law school, my friend's wife was pregnant. All 130 of us in our section knew it because he talked about it constantly. Chris wore a beeper on his belt in case his wife went into labor while he was in class. One day in torts, after we'd spent about an hour talking about accidents at birth and fetal defects and what not, his beeper went off. None of us could believe that it had chosen to go off at that exact moment, including my professor, who suddenly looked a little green. Chris stood up, looked at the beeper, and merrily said, "Well, I hope my baby isn't born dead!" Then he bolted out of the room. The baby was fine, but for at least 24 hours I think my professor was worried he had somehow cursed her.
Once, I was giving a guest lecture on the law to about 200 high school students and one of the students asked me a question. To answer it, I came up with a hypothetical on the spot revolving around drunk driving and a car wreck. If I remember correctly, I used the phrase "guy gets drunk after football game, car plows into tree …" As I'm talking, I notice some of the students start crying. A few get up and leave. A couple of teachers come over and begin to comfort people.
What I didn't know was that the week before my lecture the exact scenario had happened and a couple of students died. Once I figured out what was going on, I apologized, back-tracked, and apologized some more. But the lecture was done. They weren't able to hear me anymore. Remarkably, the evaluations they turned in for the talk were really positive, except for a few students who thought I "should have known" or "should have read the paper." I knew that I really hadn't done anything wrong, but I still wished it hadn't happened.
Basically, the clown thing reminded me of the car crash thing and Chris's baby thing, and for about two weeks I fell down a second-guessing spiral of everything I was doing. I had students read Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" (which is about a village stoning someone to death) simply because it was a classic story and I needed something short to gauge reading speed with. Should I change it to something a little less violent? I had them brief the "Ghostbuster" case and Mayo v. Satan and his Staff. Could this be offensive to the deeply religious? I used an example of a lifeguard and a child drowning to talk about negligence. Had any of my students lost someone to drowning? Should I come up with something else?
Ultimately, I calmed down and decided I didn't need to change anything, although I did get rid of the clown picture because it was pretty unnecessary, admittedly creepy, and it reminded me of Pennywise from Stephen King's "It."
Academic Support helps all students, many of them vulnerable. It has to be supportive and inclusive in a way that other parts of legal education probably don't need to be. That fact is actually one of the things I like most about it. I've turned the second-guessing into a habit, and if something sets off my radar, I either change it or ask a colleague if I'm being crazy. So far, I haven't changed anything and I've been told I'm being crazy several times, but I think I've become a more effective educator by at least asking myself the question.
(Alex Ruskell)
