Feelin’ Prickly
No, I am not in a bad mood and I am not annoyed with someone or something…at least not at the moment. It’s just that when I have stuff to do, I have such performance anxiety as a natural part of who I am that I get that prickly feeling in my backside. I imagine that the feeling itself is somewhat primordial and comes out of the cerebral cortex rather than the cerebellum. It is the knee jerk of modern man (at least Type A modern men like me). I have two jobs these days besides projects around the house. They are to teach at University of San Diego and to serve as an Expert Witness in various civil cases on a retained basis. Currently I have a three-credit class that I am teaching and I have three cases underway where I act as an expert witness. Being a teacher/professor and being a deemed expert actually carry a good deal of pressure with them, at least the way I view them.
To begin with, I take teaching very seriously. I consider teaching to be one of the most important function of man because without it we would all be spinning our wheels from one generation to the next. I take great hope from the observation that they are teaching grade school what we learned in junior high and what our parents learned in high school. Some think this is more pressure on children than is good for them, but I think quite the contrary. When you think about it, play is just the make believe performance of tasks that children will be required to perform as adults. The more we teach kids at younger and younger ages, the more meaningful and useful their play will be. I always think of that movie The Last Starfighter where the earthling kid gets recruited by the alien to fight for the coalition by virtue of his skills shown in a video game. I think it is fair to suggest that the games that kids play today will be the basis of their careers in the future. I am always trying to teach my students, who are generally young people in the starting stages of their careers, things that they can use as the basis of their next or future career steps. That is a big responsibility, so I take my lesson plans and lecture materials seriously. I know from experience that once I get on a roll on a topic, experiences and stories flow freely to fill the time, but the trick is to organize the material with a PowerPoint prompt to take me and them down a path that logically leads to the stories and/or the questions that give them the basis for their understanding of the material. In other words, the key to a meaningful and useful lecture is good preparation.
That means that I have to go through a process to make it as good as it can be. It starts with a course design that leads to a syllabus. I always use prior course syllabi if they are available to both drive my thinking down a useful path and to help me determine how much time to allocate to the subjects I decide to incorporate. There are clearly things I care more about teaching than other things. That doesn’t mean they are more important in an objective sense, but they are more important to my thinking and that means I feel I can give the students meaningful points of view and examples through many stories. I want every student to leave class thinking that they have learned something that will be useful to them. Hopefully, it is something that goes beyond what they could have learned by just reading the assignment. I see my job as being to get them to internalize this knowledge, as simple or complex as it may be. That is why my final exam is not a mystery. I have given them the six questions they will need to answer in a closed book exam. This means they will have to have internalized their answers, but since there are six and these are not one word answers, they will not be able to simply memorize their answers, but will need to be able to reason them out and remember them well enough to to put them down cogently. To me, if they can do that, they have the best chance of remembering these things well into the future.
Then, after putting together the PowerPoint such that it hits on those key topics, I need to make sure that it all ties to the reading material. One of the most common complaint from students in the past is that I assign too much reading and then don’t incorporate it enough in the lecture. I now try to make sure that is covered. I also know from experience that the more times I review the slides, the more familiar I am with them and the more fluidly they flow with stories and key learning points. This is why I get a bit anxious on game day. I want my time with the class to be put to the best possible use.
The expert witness activity is a little different. Unlike the teaching, where you will only hear of your failure to connect students to relevant material only during the evaluations at the end of the term, there is much more instantaneous feedback in the witness gig. The job of the lawyers is to make their case and they get one shot to do it. If they or any of their witnesses fall short on the stand, there is no coming back from it. Failure gets worn and overwhelms the good stuff coming from a witness. Of the three cases I am currently on, one is so sold as to have nothing new about it. I get asked to reinforce some of my opinions with added conviction, but by this time those are well known. The newest case has yet to really begin, but the big anti-trust case is in full development swing.
I submitted my report yesterday and they very quickly jumped on it to organize some discussion during a meeting today. It felt a little like an interim report card to have a gathering so quickly after writing my next draft of the report. None of that is unusual, but just like preparing for a scheduled lecture, I feel the need to be well prepared for such a discussion. In fact, what the lawyers wanted to do is to test the metal of my resolve on these issues and to voir dire my expertise. They went through a mock deposition with me, role playing the parts of the Defendant’s lawyers, trying to undercut my testimony in whatever way they can. Because I know it is a test and not the real thing, there is no hemming and hawing and I go right at my best and most honest answers. I feel strongly that my expertise is not just relevant, but top notch. Nevertheless, preparation, just like in teaching material you know and understand well, is more involved than an off-the-cuff response. My job is not only to sound convincing and direct in my preparation, but also to anticipate the soft spots that the other side might look to exploit.
My colleagues seemed to feel that I did a good job of standing up to the artificial stress test and I think that is somewhat funny. While I tend to agree that I know how to conduct myself in a deposition and on the stand (and I certainly know that I would go through extensive legal preparation for that), I simply do not worry about standing behind my expertise. I have a strong resume and held very important jobs in the industry for many years. My level or experience, as I pointed out in my cross-examination answers today, is both broader and longer lasting than anyone else involved in this case. If this were a case about something I just touched on in my career, that would only have so much value, but for over thirty years, the subject at hand was a central driving capability that I worked with day-in and day-out. It was a central theme to my work and this aspect of it is exactly why I chose to teach the subject matter for ten years and why I have had so much expert witness involvement in it. But nonetheless, just like the day of my next course lecture, on the day of my deposition (mock or real), I am always feeling’ prickly. Hopefully it is only a bit. Like I told my granddaughter Evelyn, going through life 99% excited and 1% anxious is not a bad thing.