Resiliency – Even for Professors

For the first semester of legal writing, I set aside a few minutes at the beginning of each class to discuss mindfulness and multicultural awareness. In the second semester (began today), we move deeper into mindfulness with discussions about resilience. Mindfulness sets the stage for developing resilience, a key part of professional development.

This morning, I was able to model resilience when I experienced two unexpected tech setbacks during class. The first was that my PollEverywhere polls did not integrate with PowerPoint in the way that I expected. <Note: you can only have one PollEverywhere “activity” per slide; one cannot maneuver around PollEverywhere from within one slide.> It would’ve been so awesome! Alas, class time was ticking away. The lesson – think fast, acknowledge the problem, and keep going.

And of course, the Zoom breakout rooms didn’t function as they should. Do they ever? I had planned to use the new feature by which students may select the breakout room of their choice. Little did I know that students must change a selection in their account settings to enable that feature. For some students, it had already been selected by default. For others, it was not. I found the solution after class. Again, think fast, acknowledge the problem, and keep going.

No one is perfect. Especially in legal practice (and teaching), resiliency is everything!