Through my Street Law experience, I gained a tremendous amount of confidence in my public speaking abilities. I had prior teaching experience as a teaching assistant to high school students, but never before had I been responsible for taking primary teaching responsibility and selecting what information to share with my students. Knowing that my students have a short attention span during lecture-style presentations, I had to carefully prepare my lessons so that I could convey important concepts in a concise and digestible manner. I also had to learn how to respond to the unexpected questions students would sometimes ask during lectures. Part of being able to do this is being well-prepared for each lesson - understanding different perspectives on an issue, having concrete real-life examples to use for clarifying a point, and having a lesson plan flexible enough to accommodate occasional tangential discussions.
Meredith Higashi
Class of 2007
The most basic lawyering skill that I developed during Street Law has been the ability to effectively communicate complicated legal concepts in plain English for a lay audience. One of the main reasons that I signed up for Street Law was the public speaking practice I knew I would get by teaching a class. With Street Law I was forced to modify my law school legalese into something that ninth-through-twelfth graders could understand. By the end of the course, I was no longer biting my tongue and consciously searching for the simplest, most precise words. I was doing it naturally. I was explaining concepts like hearsay without saying "offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted" because that means little to high school students. Instead, I said "an out-of-court statement that a witness claims is true."
Shan Sivalingam
Class of 2007