Well Done, My Earnest Warriors

We won. We won, we won, we won!!!

There is always a little bit of tension when we go up against a school that is so much wealthier than we are (I am talking $35,000/year in tuition wealthy). I have come to realize that the NYC Mock Trial is a pretty unique competition because there exists in this city schools that represent such a HUGE disparity of resources, perhaps unlike many other places in the world. We don't talk about it as a team much and my line with them has been to focus on our own case, not the other team. If our case is good, we can take anyone on.

But they all sense it and they report that when they walk into the courtroom they intuit strongly that the other team takes a look at them and thinks, "This is going to be easy." But if you don't foster victimhood you don't get it, and there are no victims on my team, thank heavens, and that feeling they intuit just makes them focused and fuels their concentration.

(To put this into perspective, my best boy Dimitri killed it in competition last week, earning a perfect score of 5 as a witness. As he approached the judge this week, a casual observer might have thought he was cocky, judging by his slightly off kilter stance and his bleary demeanor. But Dimitri doesn't have a cocky bone in his body, he was just exhausted. He lives in a one bedroom apartment in the Bronx with his family. His mother sleeps in the bedroom and he sleeps in the living room with his brother and sister-in-law and their 1 week baby. He hasn't slept much in a week, but will never complain. He will just say, "I raised my niece, Miss. It's alright, I love babies." And he will mean it. He also stops members of the team from taking the Lord's name in vain. Angel-boy.)

Nonetheless, our opponents were good and tenacious, but Sarfraz got in two solid sustainable objections straight away and we let them know early that they were in for fight. Witnesses on both sides were good and it became a battle between lawyers and in many ways the match frustrated me because I thought their tactics were a bit cheap, allowable, but cheap. We were far from perfect and the fierce competition led to more than a few mistakes, but all in all I think this was a best case scenario. Make the mistakes now, not later. We learned a lot.

But the cutest thing was the crush the judge had on Jorge. She was hard to read and gave little away, and although I felt we were stronger, I had no idea which way she would go in the end. But, but, but when Jorge went up or objected or anything, she just smiled, smiled, smiled. Oh man, their earnestness just shines through! I am so proud of them!

We are among the 32 left standing. We compete in three weeks. My goal was to get here, everything else is icing on the cake. But boy, do I like icing. We have decided that our goal is to try and eat lots of cake.



(Gearing up for competition outside my classroom and living up to type: Dimitri, a team leader, umps the game; Jaime the funny guy is up at bat; Mark, the butt of our jokes, pitches and falls.)

Lawyer Jorge and witness Juan (the defendant) run through their direct examination questions as we wait for our assigned courtroom.

Go Stags.