One more day of weekend training...

One of those things I have learned a million times over and yet got to learn again this morning: I’m no “fun,” educationally speaking. I wish I enjoyed creative class-project-style learning, but I don’t. As much as I love glitter and macaroni art, I want it to stay in my personal life and leave my scholastic career alone. Well, maybe some colored pens and sparkly notebooks can stay, but my fanciful learning bent is generally pretty party-for-one.

I am reluctantly willing to participate in group discussions if there’s space and I’m comfortable – particularly should my grade or some marginal slice of my teachers’ happiness depends upon it (I have been known to feel emotionally connected to my teacher over their willing impartation of knowledge and express this by learning extra-gud when I get the sense that my doing so makes any small impact on them). I begrudgingly accept the efficacy of the Socratic method. I admit that role-plays range from helpful-to-necessary in acquiring practical skills, but I just can’t get into exercises that end with a small group singing “Oompa Lumpa Dippety Doo, what would an ethical mediator do?” I’m aware that cross-pollinating the brain in this manner of creative interplay does aid in the learning process, and I respect that, but I can’t do it. I don’t even do small group discussions/presentations well enough to get much out of them. As such, I generally feel like something of a failure when the learning drifts to this style. I clam up and look disgruntled and do all the horrid snarky things I might do when parties break into party games! I regret my surliness, because it pains me to drift so far from the mark of model student, but I simply can't control myself.

In my perfect learning world, a brilliantly organized and articulate teacher gives me a lump sum of information and leaves me with provocative questions, from which I come back with a well-thought out, written response codifying this knowledge and putting my personal spin on it. Eventually the knowledge is mine and I use it to acquire more knowledge and eventually form an entire schema that serves as my mind's temporary Cave of Solitude. Of course, in the teacher’s Comme Il Fauts I am all for keeping people engaged, moving, talking, and drilling their bodies. I teach in a way that requires a lot of feedback and interaction and little building blocks in the form of physical movements, and otherwise in a way that might not cater to my personal learning needs. I guess it all follows the same formula “here’s some information, now apply it this way… now that your application has raised questions, here’s some refining information, now apply it this way.” But really I just like my version of application better than other versions.

Maybe it’s not so much not being fun as it is suffering from my age-old aversion to feeling put-on-the-spot. Even the Socratic method minimizes this to some degree, because you can read the cases and anticipate the questions. The same eventually applies to role-plays: Sure you might have to improvise, but you do so with a strong background in the material and likely experience with the directions it might go. Holding my creativity and funnosity up to the harsh light of academia just sends me into a tizzy and I assume that I will go misunderstood, per se.

That said, once the mediation training got off the ground and into the roleplays, things went pretty well. This time, the exercises were designed for single mediators and I was clever enough to volunteer to go first on my previous experience both with my dwindling mental resources as the day dragged on and the relative ease of various scenarios. My parties were pretty conciliatory and a lot of the time, it felt like I was coasting through watching them working things out. I could have done a better job writing up the agreement - more specific and more aware of the potential snafus, but it went pretty well. Once again my feedback referred to my style as something akin to "gentle stoicism," emphasis on the gentleness. I guess there are worse things to bring to a mediation table, although playing around with being firmer might expand my repetoire. I played parties in the next two mediations - the last mediation as an attorney for the city in a piddling liability case. I was a pretty aggressively adversarial attorney type to the point that I actually felt kind of guilty and was glad when our mediator called a caucus to talk to the other party in my absence. It's not often I can say that I railroaded somebody.

Anyways, the other thing I've learned time and time again: dealing with people is exhausting! I'm spent and it's already late in the evening. I can't say I'll miss these trainings even if I appreciate all that I'm learning. On the bright side, next weekend is Halloween!