To which I say: that is a good question.

For years I have flirted with the idea of becoming an attorney. Unlike teaching, it has always been on my radar. Competitive, argumentative, philosophical and ambitious, there’s probably a solid chance that I will one day find myself litigating in a court room. My flirtation with law was so intense as to result in my taking the LSAT and writing a rough draft of a personal statement. Also, telling people. Or, rather, telling everyone. Which resulted in some confusion when I emerged from the first semester of my senior year a budding zealot for education reform with a teaching job lined up in the Miami-Dade public school system. Hence, the question: But what about law school?

What about it?

The only way that I can really think to respond to the question is by saying that I have some very serious business to take care of first. I think one of the reasons that my flirtation with law school never became a full fledged romance has to do with this little but powerful voice in my head telling me “not now,” “look over there,” “no seriously look over there” and then, finally, “over there is your calling, responsibility and the life you are supposed to live.” To which I replied, “K.”

Because how else are you supposed to reply to a voice like that?

There is one place I am supposed to be next year, and that is standing in front of a classroom attending to students who have for so long been ignored and slighted by people like me: people who have reaped countless benefits and opportunities from our education system and then turned away from it to focus on “bigger” and “better.” And the tinge of disappointment (or sometimes downright disapproval) that always accompanies the question “But what about law school?” is the very reason why we are in this problem to begin with. Why aren’t we taking kids’ futures seriously? Why isn’t it “teacher, doctor, lawyer” instead of “banker, doctor, lawyer?” Where are our priorities, why do we put our talent and energies where we do?

I have a rocky path ahead. With no formal education training, I know that I am not ideally poised to serve a classroom of poor kids from the inner city. I know that these are students who, while I was sitting in philosophy seminars at a private school, were being cheated by failing public schools and steadily falling further and further behind grade level and farther and farther from their dreams and their families’ dreams for them. But as hard as I would have worked as a first year law student, I will work for my kids. And as high as the stakes would have been, well, they’re higher than that.

But what about law school?

I guess we’ll see!