Mock Trial Reflection
This week, on wednesday and thursday we did something called a mock trial. John, the leader of this project helped us make our own mini-trail. The case we “acted out” was called the “Scopes Monkey Trail”. This case was about a man named John Scopes who was a teacher at a high school in Tennessee who broke a state law of teaching evaluation to his students. I learned so much from this trail and am amazed how we learned the whole case in just two days.
We started off by randomly picking if we were on the defense or prosecution and weather you were P1 or P2. I was P2 and partnered with Trevor. To prepare for his trial we were given a big packet of information about the “Scopes Monkey Trail”. The next day was for practicing the trial and getting to know your character and what we wanted. Before this day none of us really fully understood what the case was all about but at the end of the day we were almost prepared for the actual trial. Last night, the night before the real trial we were told to rehearse what we were going to say and write our closing statement.
I think that the official trials went very well. Not only me but the whole class improved so much from the day before. All of the trails went very smoothly and I think that we sounded very professional and that we have been practicing for days or even weeks. I also think that John helped us a lot with practicing our lines and teaching us about law and how to be a good lawyer. I liked how he stopped us if we were doing something wrong and explained to us how we could improve it. He also talked a lot about public speaking and I think that will help us not only in this trial but also for community meeting and a lot of other events in our future.
Although the trial went so well I still think that I, and the way we organized this trial could definitely be improved. One thing that I had trouble with was the time constraint. At first I felt that we were just jumping into practicing the trial when I wanted to know more about how law works and what I was as prosecution. At the end of the practice day I knew a ton more about everything I needed to know. Also, if we had a day or two more I could of written a more detailed and strong closing argument. Another thing that I think could be improved is how much we write ourselves. I think that pretty much the whole trail was written for us and we didn’t really get a say in how we wanted it to be. I know that we had a time limit and we didn’t have time to write our own trial but I still think we could of done a little bit more ourselves. If we had more time we could have done this more like we usually do projects; we could have maybe picked our own trail or even made up our own. But I did like how we got to write our own closing argument. Also, maybe next time the defense council could have written their own opening.
Just because there are some things that we could improve with the trial I still think that I learned a lot more than i thought I would. From this experience I also saw got to see how hard it is to be involved in law and how hard you have to work if you want to win. I would really love to do this again next year, now that I know about the topic.
