Everything I needed to know about law school I learned from teaching primary...

For the last month, in addition to my work and school commitments, I've also been teaching a primary class at church, which consists of four and five year olds. There are 9 kids in my class. Every week for two hours on Sunday, I shelf my intelligence and play babysitter to a very precocious bunch. I think the title of "primary teacher" is a misnomer, because I really don't teach. It's quite impossible to teach children that small because they're impulsive, talkative, energetic, and unrestrained by social inhibitions that can only come with time. So my time in primary is spent talking in my "grown-up voice," struggling to keep the children in their chairs and encouraging them to raise their hand when they have something to say. This is of course completely pointless because once one person says something, seven other tiny voices chime in with variations on the exact same statement. It's quite possibly the most exhausting two hours of my week.
I had to teach a class yesterday on juvenile crime in the context of international children's rights. Before you point out the obvious, I know what you're thinking: "Children have rights?" In theory they do. And this particular class is a theory class. Anyway, as part of the grade in that class, everyone has to teach at least once. I think now would be a good time to voice my opposition to paying tuition for professors who foist the teaching responsibilities off on students. But that's not really the reason for this post. My International Children's Rights class consists of about 19 2Ls and 3Ls, and I have to say, by the time you reach the upper echelons of professional training, you expect maturity to be the order of the day. And you would be wrong in that expectation. Very wrong. As I watched the class take the sidenote topic of media restraint and run it into territory completely uncontemplated by the lesson plan, I was overwhelmingly reminded of what it's like trying to teach 5 year olds. One inane comment inevitably leads to a barrage of equally tangential arguments, everyone tries to talk at once, no one listens, and by the time you actually manage to get the class focused back on you and the lesson, 20 minutes have passed and the original message has gotten completely lost in the interim. Perhaps we should spend less time focusing on the finer points of whether or not juvenile criminals should be waived into the adult system and a little more time covering the basics of raising your hand when you want to say something, and even more time reminding people that what they may want to say probably will make everyone else dumber for having heard it, so speak with discretion.