The Faculty Lounge

Secret Student Code Busts Socratic Method?

 Well, this is my first post ever on a blog. Thank you to those at the Faculty Lounge for giving me a (temporary) platform. I hope you don’t regret it. As my first post, I thought I’d share something interesting that I heard on the running track at Temple – not exactly the faculty lounge, but close enough...

Apparently laptops are making the Socratic classroom more collaborative. One of my colleagues told me recently that when students are called on in class and don’t know the answer or haven’t read the case, they say “Let me check my notes” and this is code for other students to help them by emailing information via their laptops (apparently the medium of choice is GChat, a service of Google mail). I don’t teach by the Socratic method, certainly not by the old-fashioned “one person on the hot seat” method, and I wonder how those who do teach that way feel about this. Although I can see how this facilitates people not doing the work of the course, and it certainly is deceitful, on some level I am happy to see students helping each other as opposed to competing – collaboration is a useful lawyering skill.

 Also, I confess, I had a few professors back in the day who taught by the strict, old-fashioned Socratic method – “teaching” by humiliation – and this soured me on the whole technique. I didn’t learn effectively this way and I never saw the point, even -- especially -- after I began teaching. Yes, we professors know more than the students (no kidding, we’re lawyers! As one of my friends put it: it is like going all out to prove that you can beat a 2 year old at soccer). So, to the extent that this laptop loophole is making an end-run around the more draconian version of the Socratic method, I confess that part of me is saying ‘viva la revolucion.’

Progress and Property: Landscape Art in Antebellum America

My time in Tuscaloosa is rapidly drawing to a close.  Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending graduation and on Thursday I'm going to give a lecture on the relationship between landscape art and property law in the years leading into Civil War at one of my favorite--and one of our country's finest--art museums, the Westervelt Warner Museum.  (The Westervelt Warner owns one of Hiram Powers' statute's The Greek Slave, which is under discussion over at Althouse's shop. The statue served for antebellum Americans as a reminder that Greek Christians could be put into slavery and that we should treat others as we would want to be treated.  In essence, it tried to put Americans into a mindset that would cause them to oppose slavery.  That trope has a distinguished lineage in antislavery advocacy.)

The talk centers around my favorite work of American art, Asher B. Durand's Progress (1853), which just so happens to be owned by the museum.  This will be a huge treat for me, to have the chance to talk about that most magical of paintings at its home.  And, in fact, this talk is part of welcoming it home from travels to the Brooklyn Museum of Art and then out to San Diego for a major exhibit on Durand.  (Alice Walton's  Kindred Spirits , which is a centerpiece of her art museum Crystal Bridges, was also a centerpiece of the show.)

I try to join two themes here--first, the centrality of property and particularly humans' footprints on the land, in antebellum landscape art; second, the ways that antebellum property law reflected and amplified those values.  I don't think either of those themes is controversial; however, I have not seen them put together.  The correlation between them is not perfect--a substantial part of landscape art reveals concern over increasing human intrusions on nature.  Just not Durand's Progress.  It’s a great canvass for seeing all sorts of images of what "progress" meant-–the shift from the native Americans over on the left (the state of nature), then moving across the canvass to the right, the telegraph wires, the steam boats, the canal, the peddler, the boy bringing the cattle to market, the church, the railroad roundhouse....

I've written about pieces of this talk in a bunch of places--years ago back at co-op, then at propertyprof (focusing on Hawaiian landscape art) and ratio juris, and earlier this year at legalhistoryblog.  So major chunks of this have already been "workshopped" on blogs already.  I'll be posting a paper about this by the end of the summer.  In the meantime...

The Law of People Magazine

Ok.  It's Friday in May; it's been a very, very long year.  Time for a little fun.  (Hope I don't regret this post.)

Amidst all the talk of reform of law school, here's something that I think gets lost.  Rather than working on whole-scale changes (many of which are excellent ideas but  require coordination among many people and perhaps substantial changes in personnel) why don't individual faculty members work on incremental changes? 

One place that can happen is in making our classes more interesting to students.   This is an idea I first heard about from Maurice Rosenberg lo' those many years ago when I was a law student.  He gave this (what in hindsight I now realize is brilliant advice): write a case and include cases that will interest students.  Elegant in its simplicity, though not the easiest thing to carry off.  (And I think what interests students may be rather different from what interests us as faculty.)  It's taken me a long time to fully understand the wisdom of both pieces of that simple advice.  But what really drove home this point for me was a student many years ago who read People Magazine before class.  It seemed like every week she had a couple more example of cases that involved legal issues.  So she's talk about these before class and ask us what we all thought about them.  Never ceases to surprise me how much I learn from students.

Why, then, don't we take more examples for our classes from People Magazine?!  Sure, that may be easy for people who teach criminal law, torts, family law... maybe even intellectual property.  They can talk about all sorts of things, like assault by (or against) stars, rights of publicity and privacy, defamation, custody battles between movie stars, the list goes on and on.

Now, maybe you're like me and you teach wills, property, remedies, maybe a practicum in probate and a class on will drafting ever now and then.  What's in there for us?  Well, maybe more than you'd expect.   Back when Ms. Anna Nicole Smith passed away, I used Gerry Beyer's terrific discussion of the issues in her will in my trusts and estates class.  And there's no shortage of wills of the stars--from George Washington to the Elvis.  (Thank you Court TV!)  There's no end to will contests.

So I'm going to start an occasional series (following up on Bergin's One to Watch) here at thefacultylounge on "The Law of People Magazine."  It's going to be about cases involving stars--not necessarily only from People Magazine--that might be useful for teaching purposes.  I hope other people will join in here.

Immoral Third Graders Just Won't Listen

We learn today that Fairfax (VA) schools are debating whether to issue a report showing that Latino and African-American third graders are lagging in sound moral character and ethical development.  Oh, and kids in special education are pulling up the rear in these categories as well.  You may ask - because I sure did - how exactly does one divine a student's moral character and ethical developments?  According to the Washington Post:

The findings on third-grade morality reflected the number of elementary students who received "good" or "outstanding" marks on report cards in such areas as "accepts responsibility," "listens to and follows directions," "respects personal and school property," "complies with established rules" and "follows through on assignments." Such categories, which draw mainly on teacher observations, are common.

There are obviously a number of critiques of this research, which only start at cultural bias.  One question that jumps to mind is this: if a student's disability involves difficulty processing and following directions, can we really be surprised that she doesn't receive as much kudos in these areas?  And is that really a moral or ethical failure?  Indeed, the real problem is that somebody thinks it's appropriate to bundle these assessments into something called "moral character".  Let's just call them 'essential life skills'. 

In any case, we would do well to avoid ranking children on their morality according to race; I think we'd also do well to avoid ranking these third graders on their morality at all.