Called On, Not Called Out
One thing I was just sure would be unpleasant about law school was the Socratic method—the tradition of professors teaching class by firing questions at students who haven’t volunteered. By the time I arrived at Harvard, I had received both a lot of teasing from family and friends about The Paper Chase and a lot of assurances from people at Harvard that it was going to be nothing like that. I believed the school and ignored my friends—in fact, I deliberately boycotted The Paper Chase to avoid scaring myself unnecessarily—but I still thought being personally answerable for everything I read each day couldn’t possibly be any fun.
Three semesters later, though, I can honestly say that Socratic “cold-calling” defined my 1L experience much less than I expected. For one thing, not many of my professors applied it strictly. Some used systems to make it more predictable who they will call: two set up “panels,” meaning segments of the class eligible to be called on certain days of the week, and one worked backward through the alphabet so each student could see his or her time coming. Three others claimed to cold-call, but took so many volunteers that the real thing became a rarity.
Only my Torts professor was Socratic in all the ways you’d expect: rarely lecturing, cold-calling regularly and sometimes on the same one or two people for entire class periods, using students’ last names, the whole bit. This was intimidating for a while, but only until I realized that correct recitations of facts were hardly the goal. Once the first few people answered wrongly and nothing bad happened at all, I realized the professor’s aim was not to embarrass us, or even really to check our reading comprehension, but to force us to explore issues together—sometimes by sheer process of elimination, making wrong answers as useful to the group as right ones.
Yes, this system had me reading Ploof v. Putnam and Vosburg v. Putney with a lot more care, but it was out of a positive desire to impress far more than a negative fear of humiliation. Of course, it helped that the professor was funny and entertaining, genuinely enthusiastic, and clearly a reigning expert in the field. So—although I never would have believed it at one time—the most Socratic class I had also turned out to be the most fun. And when my section convened at the end of the first semester to watch The Paper Chase with our Contracts professor, some of the loudest laughter at the classroom scenes came from me.
- Lea
