Page 650 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
had chosen those portions of the book that I thought were appropriate, and had then selected and added a series of articles and extracts from actual legal documents (something that I never saw in law school) that would handle matters that are not found in the casebooks, all to just about fill out the fourteen-week semester and accomplish my pedagog- ical goals. I had devised what I thought was a brilliant syllabus to take the students through the rudiments of real estate development and real estate finance, covering, among many other things, leverage, cash flow, taxable income, depreciation, construction and “permanent” financing, the ground lease, the standard mortgage, secondary financing, wrap- around financing, participating and convertible mortgages, exculpation, sale-leasebacks, cooperative conversions, foreclosure, bankruptcy, and workouts. In short, as usual, I thoroughly overdid it, but I should have felt absolutely ready for my first class.
But I didn’t. I’m standing in the crowded hall, theoretically pre- pared, but with my heart pounding and my head drowning in a torrent of nightmarish questions. Would the students realize that I wasn’t really a law professor, that I was just a lawyer masquerading as one? (As I learned through time, part of growing up is realizing that almost every- body is masquerading some of the time; it’s just that some people don’t realize that they are playing the part.) Would anybody have prepared for class? (As it turned out, no one ever prepared for the first class of the semester.) Would I be facing students who had the same attitude as I did when I was at Columbia Law School? (If there were any, and I guess that there were, I couldn’t spot them; they would do their cutting after the first class.) While I knew that it was likely that almost everyone would show up for the first class, would I be able to hold their interest so that they would show up thereafter? Or would I find myself forced to face a cavernous classroom populated by maybe twelve students, sprawled and interspersed in the back rows, nodding off, totally unprepared?
They say that turnabout is fair play, and, had my nightmares become reality, I certainly would have deserved it. But they did show up, and the room was always substantially filled. This appealed to me. As far as I was concerned, the teaching and the learning took place in the classroom.
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