4.2.12 WC: 191694 class I deliberately made a mistake in asking about a case. I asked what the jury instruction had been. A student sheepishly raised his hand and said, “Professor, there was no jury instruction - - the case was tried before a judge.” I said, “Woops - - I made a mistake. You’re right,” and I moved on. I noticed that after that “mistake” the students loosened up and were prepared to take many more risks. I have repeated this ploy many times to loosen up a class. Sometimes my mistakes in class were completely unintentional and darn embarrassing. Once I was teaching about a criminal concept that required the prosecution to build a wall separating information obtained under grant of immunity from information independently secured through investigation. The courts described this as a “Chinese Wall” because it had to be impenetrable. I was raising the possibility that one prosecutor may have improperly leaked information to another prosecutor, and I described it as follows: “There may have been a chink in the Chinese Wall.” A Chinese American student in the class immediately took offense, erroneously believing that I was referring to Chinese people with that racial epithet. The thought had never occurred to me, but I never used that particular phraseology again. I also offended some of my Jewish students once when I was comparing Canada’s approach to affirmative action to our own. In Canada, only “visible minorities” are eligible for affirmative action. A student asked me whether Jews were a visible minority. I responded, “No, we’re an audible minority.” Even though I was joking about my own group, I got flack from a number of Jewish students who thought I was reaffirming an old stereotype. I quickly learned that humor was important to my teaching but that humor based on racial, gender or religious stereotyping could raise sensitivities. I was sympathetic, therefore, when I asked a first year student how we would have responded to a particular plea bargain