Where Was Spencer When the Lights Went Out? In The Dark—Teaching!

Pandemonium!  Okay, it was not pandemonium.  It was me running around in the dark teaching.  Half an hour before class was to start, the power had gone out.  And what did my students and I decide to do when the power stayed out?  Learn together in the dark!  Would it have worked on Zoom?  No!—the power was out!  And it wouldn’t have been as much fun, been as good learning, or worked as much to help me and maybe my students get out of some February doldrums.

It had just promised to be an annoyance when the power went out in the law school building and some buildings around us.  A student and I were feeling lucky.  We had just done a hearing by phone in a room that would have gone very dark with no windows.  We had left it for my office to debrief.  What would have happened in an administrative hearing if the lights went out?  It would have failed and likely would have ended.  Our client would likely have had to wait months for another chance at a hearing.  But we had done it and were debriefing in my office when the power went out.  It was darkish, but we kept going by the light from my windows, both of us Monday morning quarterbacking the hearing a bit and taking down the adrenaline from the hearing. 

But then the power stayed out and we were supposed to have class.  Our classroom is on the sixth floor, my office on the first, and whether the elevators worked or not, we weren’t going to get in them.  And then the emails came from my students on my phone, telling me they were upstairs.  They were?  Except for me and my student who had just done the hearing, they were upstairs all around the building.  Up the five flights I went, finding students who were wondering what was going on along the way.  I pulled them together in the classroom and almost in unison, they said to me they wanted to have the class!  I thought about class with no power.  Computers would work if charged but the internet would not work—imagine a class without internet!  Without even the possibility a text messages and emails to interrupt us.  The students told me it would be an adventure, and that they would have a story to tell about learning in the dark.  And they would not do what we might have had to do otherwise—go home and be on zoom.  We have a little light in the classroom from a large bank of indoor windows grabbing light from an atrium with a skylight two flights up.  They wanted to continue.  And we did.  It took my going up and down five flights three or four times, but we were all together and ready to learn.

Was it my best teaching?  Maybe.  I drew on a dimly lit white board laws they could not find online that we were discussing.  We did case rounds where we were able to laugh about what students remembered with and without their computers from previous classes they’d taken and they got to think about what might actually be relevant from their non-clinical classes when they were lawyers.  We gave a few ideas to the student presenting in case rounds, left, and went on to the rest of the day.  We learned that while we were learning, the school had reasonably decided to close for the rest of the day.  I met with several students later in the day individually on zoom, but we had escaped it for at least one class and did some good learning in the process.

I had been looking for something to brighten up the class, the clinic, my mood, and maybe my students’ moods.  I’ve written before in this blog about the general melancholic blues of early February.  Winter holidays are long over, and other than a mostly illusory spring break for many students and at least for this clinical teacher who will need to work through it, there is little outside of school to enliven our lives until Memorial Day and summer begins.  Two years of on and off zoom classes and Covid, including delayed in-person teaching at our school as well as most every other school I know due to the latest Covid variant, have only made February blues worse.  We could not stand another visit of the Ghost of Zoom Teaching Past, and at least for a few hours, I benefitted from my students’ resilience, and we learned and enlivened our lives together.