Erasmus Exchange Students taking International Business Law class getting together for a drink at Cafe De Tribunal
It’s exam week for my International Business Law students (with their final memorandum assignment due tomorrow). This period just flew by and it feels like it was only yesterday that we just met one another. This is one of the small things that make me a bit sad about my job because I feel like having only met these students and having spent the last seven weeks with them, I was just getting to know them better. We were also picking up some momentum to engage with the subject a bit deeper as well.
To be fair, we did manage to put in a lot in this short period of time: We covered the substance of international business law through assignments like drafting a negotiation strategy, conducting a settlement negotiation and drafting a legal memorandum. We also developed global citizenship skills from empathetic listening and creative problem solving by working with Erin Meyer’s Culture Mapping exercise or enabling the students to tap into their own academic curiosities by asking them to design elevator pitches for an IBL related topic of their own choosing. Yet, I still feel sad and unsatisfied because deep down, I believe I have more to offer and if only we had more time, we could do much more (it is possible that the students may not share the same sentiments and enthusiasm here, but I digress).
To release some of my lingering frustrations, I have set up extra-curricular projects starting with an international commercial contract negotiation exercise between a handful of my (soon-to-be-former) IBL students and students from Toyo University in Tokyo (where I taught during my fellowship last year). Some of the other upcoming exercises involve running Harvard Negotiation Project’s multi-party simulations for our students and workshops on international commercial arbitration. While I’ve been told that I should probably take some things off my plate, working on these projects with enthusiastic students is one of my guilty pleasures and dare I say, my hobby? It may sound strange to consider an extension of my work as a hobby, but I’m sure that there are worse hobbies out there like running ultramarathons?
For now, these events will keep me going until I start teaching again in the next period, where I’m coordinating three courses across three different faculties, but that is an entirely different kind of frustration and sadness about teaching.