November 6th
After the success of their conversations about the government, I decided to run with their dedication and passion. So, I got a bit experimental and sat down to start reading some Cicero. I was searching through a topic I was wildly unfamiliar with in order to get a few ancient court cases to work with. With an education of elementary level Latin and a multitude of tabs open to the Loeb Classical Library, I got to work designing an activity that I hoped would garner some participation.
Something I hadn’t been expecting was the severe drop-off of enthusiasm as the winter season began to roll in, and excitement about Thanksgiving break was on the minds of my students far more prominently than anything I could present on. They wanted to talk? I’d give them something to talk about.
I came into the classroom and arranged all the desks into a circle. When they came back from lunch, the search to find their spot was far more exciting to them than I had been anticipating. I told them all to close their eyes. At each desk, I dropped off a brown folder, bound with legal jargon across the front. When they opened them, they were met with their activity for the day:
They were to be lawyers, tasked with solving some of the strangest court cases from the ancient world. They would be assigned to the prosecution or defense, then take the stand and argue their case. However, they would need to spend time with their legal team crafting the perfect statements and responses to win the vote. I made sure to let them know that I would not be telling them the outcome of the cases before they argued them, so as to not make either team feel as though they had already won or lost. Secretly, it was so they didn’t assume that there was a correct answer to get to, as they were inclined to do. Rather, I wanted to have them focus on the specific wording and argumentative language they had been learning for essays in a new and exciting setting.
If I get into legal trouble in my future, I will be absolutely sure to check in with a few of my students to get them to represent me.
They started incredibly strong, almost everyone wanting to participate and share their argument. Some of the students that were more on the shy end ended up passing the arguments they’d written down to another, earning the participation points for constructing the rhetoric, but just not quite being up to pointing fingers accusatory.
“Of course the statue was at fault for killing a man!” One girl said with a lilt that spoke of years of waiting for her moment to be a lawyer from the movies. “The victim was beating up the statue! He messed with it, so it fell on him! It was hubris!”
“But what if the statue was made wrong?” The rebuttal quickly followed the statement. “What if it had been installed so that it would fall?”
This then descended into discourse that pertained to the very nature of if a state could be held in contempt at all. All the while, they were practicing argumentative and essay writing skills that they had previously scoffed at. It was a chore to write a paper for those kids! All of the thoughts they had existed in their minds already, so allowing them to speak them, use concepts that they had learned before in practical spaces gave them the opportunity to get excited about stating a thesis and defending it.
