On Monday I'll start teaching a new module. It’s mine - conception, design, execution. A virgin territory of legal pedagogy, untouched by other hands, and, yes, I suppose I’m proud of it. It feels a little like Frankenstein must have felt, looking at his creation before it began demanding all his free time and racking up the electricity bill. There’s the rush of novelty, the thrill of steering a ship I have built myself, but also the sinking realisation that I might now have to sail it through waters I haven’t charted and might not like.
Fifteen years and counting of teaching law has left me, if not jaded, then at least comfortable. Comfortably numb, one might say, but that’s a touch melodramatic. The point is, most of my lectures are as finely aged as a good Camembert. I know where the tricky bits are, where the students will glaze over, where to throw in a joke about some current event to rouse them from their torpor. Everything is prepped, polished, and on autopilot. Occasionally, I tweak things to keep up with the shifting sands of case law, but it’s mostly maintenance work. I’ve reached the point where I can recite chunks of lectures like a BBC announcer reading the shipping forecast.
This new module, however, is a different beast. It's fresh, exciting, and, quite frankly, exhausting. I’ve had to think - really think - about what I want to say, what I want the students to learn, and how to herd them towards something resembling intellectual enlightenment without losing them to the siren call of their phones. Worse still, I’ve had to read a lot. And not just skim-read, the way one might a colleague's paper in the early hours of the morning while the tea has gone tepid. Proper reading. Annotating. Making notes. This module is an abyss, and I am its Nietzschean gazer.
Don’t misunderstand me: I love teaching. Or at least, I love good teaching. Ok, I mildly like good teaching. It’s just that I happen to love research, and this module is devouring the time I’d set aside to do exactly that. Research, after all, is where I get to play. It’s where I find those delicious intersections between law and literature, the moments where Tolstoy feels like a case note and a case note feels like Tolstoy. It’s where I get to revel in the madness of interpretation, to find Dickens in civil procedure and Dante in contract law. It’s the kind of intellectual pleasure that keeps one coming back for more, even after years of trying to explain the difference between ratio decidendi and obiter dicta to blank-faced undergraduates.
Now this module is the cuckoo in the nest. Every carefully laid plan, every beautifully constructed research timetable, has been pecked to death by its need for attention. It’s hard not to resent it, at least a little, even as I admire the way it grows and takes shape. It’s like being a parent to a particularly precocious child - simultaneously proud and exasperated.
The problem is that I can’t even fall back on cynicism. This module, this Frankensteinian creation, feels important. It’s designed to push students to think differently about the law, to see its connections to the world around them and not just as a system of rules, but as something that lives and breathes and occasionally bites. It’s ambitious, and possibly doomed, but that’s part of the thrill. So yes, on Monday I’ll walk into that classroom, a little tired, a little resentful, and more than a little nervous. But I’ll also walk in with a flicker of excitement that I haven’t felt in a while. It’s the same excitement I felt when I first started teaching, before I knew how much effort it would take or how much I’d have to sacrifice to do it well. It’s the excitement of something new, something untested, something that might, just might, be worth the trouble.