Professorial Style in Context 153ent combinations and styles. For example, in Class #5, we find the professor using
humor in an attempt to pull a student who is having a great deal of difficulty
into the dialogue:
Transcript 7.8 [5/24/3]Prof.: Promises of a limited commitment. What elegant language. What
abstract beauty. What could that possibly mean here?
Mr. O.: To be honest, I only really understood, or I didn’t really understand how
it fit into the case.
Prof.: These cases are very, very confusing and perplexing and they make you
want to throw the book against the wall. But then most of the cases in
this book will do that. Promises of the limited commitment. Try again.
What do you suppose that means? Forget about the () case for just a
moment. What do you think promises of a limited commitment means?The ensuing dialogue causes both interlocutors some hard work, as the student
struggles with questions he is having difficulty comprehending. The professor nei-
ther ridicules the student nor gives up on him (although it seems clear that the
student might have wished that the professor did give up at some points!), but
continues doggedly to shift the ground of the questions, moving first back to the
open-ended prompt, “Tell me more about the () case,” then to a question that
provides strong structure, “Let’s put it this way, what’s the contract in that case, if
there is one?,” and then jumping on the student’s first clear response, “That’s simple,
that’s straightforward, and now we’re beginning to get somewhere.” As the dia-
logue progresses, the professor uses positive affirmations, repetition, first-person
plural-inclusive, structured questions, and reported speech (“as you said before”)
to provide encouragement and also cohesion with the student’s prior responses:
Transcript 7.9 [5/24/5]Prof.: What are we supposed to have before we have a contract?
Mr. O.: Consideration?
Prof.: That’s one possibility. Is there consideration here? Is there consideration
on both sides of this arrangement? And you’re quite right, this section is
concerned with consideration. It’s one of the things that’s going on. Let’s
try to find some. Is there any obligation on the side of the party ordering
the gas?
Mr. O.: Mmm, I don’t think so.
Prof.: No. Because, as you said before, Mr. O., it was “if” that party decided to
order the gas.In the midst of the dialogue, the professor pauses, as did the professor in Class #4
earlier, to cue the student as to the legal test that is to be applied:
Here we have one of these fancy, very specific oral contracts. Is this barred by the stat-
ute of frauds? This isn’t a contract involving land, apparently, but there are other
problems in the statute of frauds, specifically, the problem of contracts that can’t be
performed within a year. Is this a contract that can’t be performed within a year? It