2006-08-25 - 8:20 p.m.

What a strangely quiet Friday night. My spouse is at a studio recording music. My two closest friends are at home tending to their newborns. I just finished my first week of my second year of law school.

The law school thing definitely seems funner this year. Lots funner. It’s a little surreal to be a student teacher, though. The professor I’m paired with asked me to teach 20 minutes of the class on our second day. Second day! This “professor” isn’t really a professor; rather, she’s a lawyer who comes on campus and teaches two 50-minute class sessions each week. She’s probably not that much older than I am. Nonetheless, I kinda expected her to do most of the teaching. Not so. To my surprise, I had to scramble to come up with a “lesson.” I was super nervous, mainly because I feel like I’m teaching a bunch of my peers, many of whom went to Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and other such places. And 20 minutes is a long time to blather on! Still I pulled it together, and I thought I did a pretty good job. However, afterward, I met with the “professor” to go over next week’s lesson plan, and she said, “By the way, I have one very important critique of your presentation today. When you’re talking to the students, don’t ever refer to me by my first name. I want the students to refer to me as Professor Raphael.”

For some reason, I felt crushed after that. I was so wanting her to say, “Nice job up there!” Or, “Boy, with public speaking skills like that, you should run against Hillary for the Democratic nomination in ’08!” Or something.

When I e-mailed Erik to tell him about my feelings of failure, he wrote back:

Whatever, Professor Raphael. You should demand that she call you Princess Peach.

I totally should.

 

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