New Kid on the Hallway

Haven't done this in a while

(Mostly because I haven't looked at my stats in ages. But I'm procrastinating.)

Recent internet searches that found my blog:

1. ways to enjoy teaching
2. funny cat pictures with captions
3. generalizations about Indian women
4. specialist in education cannot wear a doctoral gown
5. people are idiots look around you that is slowly becoming my favorite pedagogical principle
6. hallway pedagogy
7. why do you want to teach history
8. would have done differently
9. doing what you like is freedom
   

I especially love #4 (it sounds like an existential crisis), #5 (just cracks me up), #6 (I want to trademark that somehow), #8 (so wistful), and #9 (damn straight).

My searches still seem to be academic related; I wonder if I'll ever get law-school related searches here.

Of course, finding out would require me checking my stats more than once every six months, so I doubt I'll ever know.

Quick comments on the curve

I was going to post this as a comment, but it was getting kind of long, and I had had no inspiration for a blog post, so I said to myself, Self, why not turn this comment into a post??

Anyway, in response to my last (self-congratulatory!) post, What Now? asked:

So, um, not to state the obvious, but ... doesn't grading on a curve essentially make it each person for him or herself and work against student cooperation? How does that work with the fabled law school study groups? And is the theory that law is a dog-eat-dog world, so that one might as well get a head start on competing with others? But don't lawyers actually work with one another a lot of the time?

So, the curve - everyone's least favorite element of law school...

Literally, the curve does pit everyone against everyone else. If my friend and I take the same exam, and write 99% the same material, but she includes 1% more of what was expected/required than I do, even if the exams would get the same grade in every other reasonable universe (like the classes I used to teach!), she will get a better grade than I will. And whether those grades are A/A- or C/C- depends entirely on what everyone else in the class did anyway.

In theory, that should result in people being unwilling to help each other because one student doing well means that another student has to do worse; there's none of the "If everyone in the class learns all the material I'm happy to give everyone As" that I used to say when I was teaching. If someone gets an A, someone else gets a C to balance it out. (Or at least, something like that; there are enough different ways to curve a class's grades that I don't know exactly how the profs at my school do it.)

In practice, however, it hasn't been a problem.

First of all, the fabled law school study groups are, at least in my school, kind of a fable... I know people who tried them last year, but I don't know anyone who kept them up consistently over the course of the semester. The only time I've seen study groups work has been short-term, when people gett together during finals to do practice exams together. Those are really helpful, and I guess the idea is that any help you're giving other people is balanced out by the help you're getting! There are certainly people who don't study in groups, but I think it's more because they don't find groups helpful than because they fear giving aid to the enemy.

(I try to do practice exams with other people in the period leading up to finals, although last semester, that didn't always work based on who I had classes with and when the exams were. Amusingly, thinking about it, my lowest grade was in the class I did the most practice exams for, and that highest grade was in a class I did NO practice exams for... although last spring, my lowest grade was in a class I did no practice exams for, so I'm not going to take that as a winning strategy.)

I'm lucky that at my school, the atmosphere is very collegial and supportive, despite the fact that yes, the curve pits us against each other. I guess we mostly operate on the theory that there's no honor to doing well if it's because you sabotaged someone else. After all, this is a fairly small legal market, and most people practice locally when they finish; you WILL run into your classmates all the time, and if you were a dink about helping others out, they WILL remember. (I think there may also be some of Castiglione's sprezzatura to this: getting good grades because you're a machine grinding away on your work on your own is definitely good. But making the good grades look effortless - making them look easy by being willing to give assistance to any who ask - is even better.)

I don't know to what extent the atmosphere is different at other schools - I'd love to hear about other law students' experiences. Certainly the reputation for law school, in general, is intensely competitive and unpleasant, but I do find that the culture of my law school mitigates that. (I actually think competing for the same jobs is much more frustrating and unpleasant than competing for grades on the curve, but then, I'm doing okay on the curve so far, and job applications give me academic-market-induced flashbacks, so I may not be representative!)

It is frustrating sometimes to feel like your grade didn't represent your actual effort/knowledge, but it is what it is. What's kind of nice, though, is that if you're unhappy with a given grade, you can blame the curve, and not your inherent abilities. (Which is what I did with my lowest grade from last semester.) If everyone gets the grade they "deserve," and everyone else gets As/Bs and you get a C, it's easy to think you're a total idiot and loser. But when you know that only a small number will get As, and that any A has to be balanced by a C, and you get a C, then you don't have to feel like an idiot - you just have to accept that for whatever reason, many of the people in that given class on that given day wrote a better exam than you did. The difference between your raw score and the A raw score might only be 5 points, but someone has to get the C. So you may have known the material perfectly well; others just knew it slightly better. It makes the grade slightly less personal. (Bad grades still suck, but it's possible not to take them as a referendum on your inherent abilities.)

As for the theory behind grading on a curve: I don't think it's to pit students against each other (at least, not now - that might have been the original motive, who knows? As far as I know, law schools have always graded on a curve, so I'm not sure there's much examination of it by this point). One of the reasons for using a curve is that it can help as well as hurt people. If everyone knows the material really well, my way-more-than-adequate exam can get a very ordinary or even bad grade, because everyone else knew just a little bit more. But on the other hand, if everyone in the class TANKS the exam, the curve means not everyone does terribly, and you can get a really good grade just for not being quite as awful as everyone else. (It's kind of like why some of the sciences grade on a curve, as I understand it - the average grades on some tests would otherwise be in the 40s or 50s! One of my profs who had a multiple choice component told us that last year the average grade on the multiple choice was 60%. It's MUCH nicer for that 60% to equal a B rather than a D!)

My personal theory about the curve is that it's a mechanism to force some kind of ranking of the students. Because of the way law school admissions work, everyone at a given law school tends to have had a very similar GPA/LSAT score (you can have the occasional outlier, especially when someone with high scores for your school goes there because they got a scholarship, but usually everyone's within a relatively narrow range). At most schools, these are all students who did really well in undergrad and are used to academic success. Without a curve, you'd probably have a lot of classes in which everyone got kind of around the same score. And then it would be difficult to distinguish between everyone, and employers would get cranky. The big fancy important firms want to know which students they should hire, and want to be able to distinguish their hires from other people's hires by trumpeting their fanciness (top student in his class! Order of the Coif! Magna cum laude! etc.). Even if law school grades don't always correlate directly with lawyering ability. (This is why the very top schools, like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford can get away without giving letter grades - I think they're all some variation of High Pass/Honors, Pass, Fail; their brand is a proxy for ability and prestige. You can brag about all the Harvard and Stanford grads at your firm even if they actually graduated the bottom of their classes, because hey, Harvard and Stanford!)

So those are my maybe not-so-quick thoughts on the curve. It's funny how resigned to it I've become by now, when using a curve is entirely against my pedagogical principles (I never graded on a curve - the closest I ever came was not counting a question on a quiz if everyone bombed it, maybe). I do believe that everyone should just get the grade they earn, if that means everyone gets As or everyone gets Cs. But I don't run law school. (There are LOTS of things I'd change about law school pedagogy, if I were queen of the universe.) I just have to survive it. And since every law school that I've ever heard of grades on a curve, I don't spend a lot of energy questioning it; I just deal with it. Thankfully, at my school, it's not that bad. 

Oh, law school, don't ever change

I finally looked at my grades from last semester (at my school, they trickle in one by one as the professors submit them, so many of them have been in for quite a while. I made a vow, however, not to look at the grades until they were ALL in, because looking at them one by one just prolongs the agony and messes with my head. Hence, the band-aid rule: only look at them once, getting it over with fast to minimize the pain. Grades were due a couple of weeks ago, but one of my classes was about the 3rd-to-last of all to post, so I wasn't able to look until today).

Anyway, I'm quite happy with how they turned out, but they prove the immutable law of law school: it is IMPOSSIBLE to predict your grades. Seriously. I know everyone says this, it's a law student blog cliché. Which, sadly, is because it's true.

My highest grade: The class I -- well, hated is a strong word, but let's just say it was my least favorite? and I kind of stopped doing the reading partway through the semester? and it met at a time of day when my brain checks out anyway? and I disagreed with the instructor's pedagogy? and I didn't really prepare for the exam until three days before? and I know other very smart people in the class who got their lowest grade in that class? Yeah, my highest (and very good) grade was in that class.

My lowest grade: Perhaps my favorite class of the semester, fascinating subject, brilliant prof, just all around really, really interesting. I worked my ass off to prepare for the exam and I worked my ass off  taking the VERY LONG take-home exam. Grade: very very ordinary. (Mind you, the class was full of 3Ls who've taken classes on related subjects before, often with the same prof, so I like to think my exam was fine, everyone else was just especially brilliant.)

The class in which I completely forgot that the exam had a word limit until after ExamSoft had kicked in and shut the test down? Good grade. (Guess I wasn't as wordy as I thought!)

The class in which I completely utterly had NO IDEA what the first exam question was asking for? Good grade. (That said, no one else I talked to had any idea what the first exam question was asking for, either, so I guess our collective ignorances canceled each other out?)

So, yeah. The one predictable thing about law school is that you can't predict your grades. Thank God I only have three more semesters to go through this roller-coaster!

First time's the charm

So, I have to thank you all for your good wishes, because I got the position I was running for! Am very pleased and excited. (Especially since at the moment I can bask in having got the position without yet having to do any work for it.)

It was kind of nice, actually, because right after I found out I ran into a couple of women from this group, who asked me if I'd heard yet about the position, and were all excited for me when I said I'd got it, and said they'd voted for me and were all pleased that I was going to be in that position. And honestly, I know it's very Sally-Field-ish, but that gave me a really nice feeling. 

And then after class, in the hallway, I walked past two of the unsuccessful candidates, walking together.

Awkward.

(Actually, not really -- they're nice people, and one said, "Congrats," and it will all be fine. But yeah, a little awkward.)

January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968

Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority. (1963)

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction....The chain reaction of evil--hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars--must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.(1963)

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important. (November 13, 1962)

First time for everything

I'm running for an office for something I'm involved with at school. It's kind of a big deal, in the context of this activity; there are five other candidates.

When I stopped to think about it, I realized that this is the first time I've ever run for anything. In my life. Ever.

I can't decide whether it surprises me that I've never been willing/interested in running for anything before, or it surprises me that I'm willing to do it now.

What I do know is that I have no idea what the results will be. I think I'm very qualified for this position, more qualified than most of the candidates (except possibly one). But then, we've already elected two people for two other positions, and in neither case did the group elect the person I voted for. In fact, in one of those cases the group elected someone I dismissed almost immediately as one of the weakest candidates. So clearly, I have no idea what's going into these votes. If it's just a popularity contest, I probably don't have much of a chance. And even if it's not, who knows?

But if you feel like sending good thoughts my way over the next two days, when the voting is taking place, I would much appreciate it!

Way behind the times, but:

I finally saw Avatar. (I know, everyone else and their dog saw it weeks ago. Sue me.) Not that this is news, but: gorgeous visuals, terrible story. I mean seriously, Cameron was just phoning it in when he came up with, oh, the characters, storyline, and dialogue. (The only line NLLDH and I liked: "Don't play with that, you'll go blind.")

Which isn't to say that I wasn't entertained. I can suspend disbelief with the best of them; for the duration that the lights are out and the big screen is lit up, I'm transformed pretty much into the lowest common denominator of movie goers. Cliches? Love 'em! Hackneyed storylines? Bring 'em on.

But yeah, the story was pretty pathetic. I mean, even leaving aside the highly questionable racial politics of the white guy showing up, learning native culture in a matter of weeks well enough to be adopted as one of the indigenous folks, and then being the ONLY PERSON who can lead the natives to victory. It's more like, what Cameron thought was the whole story is only the beginning. No one seriously thinks the "Sky People" are going to leave the Na'vi in peace to rebuild their world, right?

The interesting part isn't that a so-called "more advanced" society comes into conflict with a "simpler" one, and oh my god! the technologically advanced people are evil! the "primitive" society is good! Colonialism is baaaaaad! The interesting part is what happens after Cameron shut his cameras off: what the hell does an indigenous society do after being introduced to an entirely new and different culture? Cameron says that the earthlings "have nothing the Na'vi want," but no society is monolithic. I bet a lot of the Na'vi might decide that figuring out how to build a few of those guns for themselves could be a good idea. I bet that some of the Na'vi clans who aren't doing so well in relation to the others might decide that cozying up to the Sky People could be a good idea. I bet a lot of much more interesting, complex issues about how an indigenous society resists, adapts, persists, transforms, and survives colonialism develop long after that admittedly exciting and horrifying big battle.

I mean, I'll grant that the movie's basic message -- "Don't bulldoze another peoples' home in the pursuit of money" -- isn't anything I can take issue with. But, really, can anyone take issue with that message? Is there anything to debate about it? Can't we all get behind that message by now without needing to see a lot of pretty blue people get blown up?

I'll also grant that the final battle is pretty effective. No matter how hackneyed the story, watching the gunships fly into the sacred mountains and beat the tar out of the Na'vi is horrifying. And the way the planet ultimately responded made me cheer. It's also probably not a coincidence that there's almost no dialogue throughout this segment.

As NLLDH said, I've certainly spent $10 on worse things. Pandora is beautiful; the animation is amazing; I especially liked the way Neytiri moves, and how cat-like she looks when she hisses and bares her fangs. And I think the movie benefits immensely from the fact that Sam Worthington somehow oozes sympathetic-ness. (Sympathy for Sam Worthington's character was the only thing that kept Terminator: Salvation from being an UTTER waste of time, rather than largely a waste of time. Though it would be interesting to see if he can play anything other than a man of action [rather than words/thought/science] put into an impossible situation. God knows the new Clash of the Titans looks AWFUL.)

But, wow. What a waste of a beautiful world.

The generosity of finding time to tell other people you think they're idiots

Awww, I had a widdle troll!

I concluded my last post by saying that I would try to write something more interesting/positive soon, and "shelly" took the time and care to write in and say, "Why start now?"

Bless her little heart. Doesn’t it give you all a warm feeling to know that someone who clearly thinks I’m a boring whiner actually takes the time to read my boring whines so she can inform me of the error of my ways? Where would the internet be without people willing to read things they don’t enjoy that clearly don’t enlighten them in any way? How else would we know that we offend them? Society would grind to a halt!

(In the interests of full disclosure, I do actually read a couple of blogs that irritate me. I’m not talking about anything as concrete as having political conflicts/differences; I just find these people annoying. Don’t worry, they’re not any of you; if I’ve ever left a comment on your blog, it’s not you. Because I have a rule that I am NOT allowed to comment on these [very few] blogs. What would be the point of commenting on opinions that are perfectly valid other than the fact that I don't share them? I read these blogs periodically because I find it useful, sometimes, to be reminded that other people see the world in very different ways than I do, and that they still have friends and supporters and so on. But it’s not like there’s any point telling these people what I think of them. Do any of the rest of you do this? Or am I just a glutton for punishment?)

Cranky, cranky, cranky

Annoying day today. The class I was very much looking forward to (as it's about stuff I feel I know quite a bit about) was couched entirely in economic terms. I do not have an economist's brain, so I ended up feeling stupid, because it felt like everything I had to say was a jigsaw puzzle piece that didn't fit. Beyond that, I greatly dislike the way economists are so smug about being "rational" about everything, where that means evaluating everything in terms of maximization of dollars. Guess what? The value of some things can't BE expressed in purely monetary terms.

(My apologies to reasonable economists who don't do this.)

(And no, the class was not described as having anything to do with economics, so it's not like I walked into Venture Capital and then was upset they were talking in economic terms.)

And then there was an incident today that suggests I totally don't see things in the way many of my law school peers see things. (Sorry to be vague, I don't want to go into details because it's not really my story, but it annoyed me.)

And everyone on the highway home seemed determined to drive right behind me WITH THEIR HIGH BEAMS ON.

Harumph. You kids, get offa my lawn!

Will try to write something more interesting/positive soon...

Today was better

Thanks in no small part to your supportive comments -- so thank you, everyone! I appreciate it.

But also, I arrived at school this morning to find that everyone else was freaking out about how yesterday afternoon had gone, too -- I ran into any number of people saying, "You know, Monday was great, and Tuesday morning, and then Tuesday afternoon everything fell apart." And when we walked into class the teacher for the day said, "So, we faculty hear that you were all pretty freaked yesterday afternoon." So we spent a half hour or so walking through the stuff we'd all freaked out about from the day before, which was HUGELY helpful.

Plus, one of my teachers complimented me (outside of class) on how I was doing, so I guess I wasn't quite as incompetent as I felt!

So it was a much better day, although we had a ton of snow roll in around lunchtime and it took me two hours to get home, and I should have spent the evening prepping for tomorrow, but I haven't. Ah well.

And on something sort of related: cc prof asked, "Why litigation?" First, I don't think I ever said I didn't want to do litigation; I said it wasn't necessarily what I wanted to do. (What I said I didn't want to do was work for a big firm.) It's not like I knew very much about either litigation or transactional work before going to law school, so I didn't want to go in with any assumptions. (Especially because so many people go to law school because they think Law & Order makes it look cool, and I wanted to distance myself from that!) But as I learned more, I decided litigation sounded more interesting than transactional law. I really like the way it requires you to come up with a convincing story and figure out the best way to get someone to believe that story (whether you're talking about facts to the jury or law to the judge) -- crafting a narrative is really fascinating. I really like thinking about word choice, for instance -- what impact does it have to call someone "the plaintiff" vs. "Mr. Smith" vs. "the bereaved husband" or the like? (that last option's a little heavy-handed, but you get the idea.)

There's probably a LOT of room for playing around with word choice in transactional law as well, at least sometimes, but going the transactional route seemed to have more potential for ending up stuck in a room doing the same kind of thing over and over. (Construction contract. Another construction contract. Yet another construction contract...) I don't at the moment have an area of law that fascinates me so much that I'd enjoy that; I like the overall process, the way the system works, but I'm less attached to what exact content that system's dealing with.

And if I'm being absolutely completely utterly honest? Here's my deepest darkest secret: I think it would be quite marvelous, someday, to be a judge. (I'm not aiming high, people; the dinkiest local position would be fine with me.) And I can't imagine anyone's going to end up on the bench who doesn't have a lot of litigation experience.

And here's the final thing: I think I've spent an awful lot of my life waiting for others to tell me what I'm good at and what I should do with myself. I tend to feel that for whatever reason, it's not up to me to decide something is interesting and therefore I will pursue it; I wait for some kind of sign from the universe, something external that will tell me this --THIS! is what you should do for the rest of your life!! It's finally dawned on me, though, that the other (more sensible) way to do this is actually to decide for YOURSELF what is interesting and actually to try to make THAT happen, rather than sitting back to see what the universe will dump in your lap.

So I decided: I want to work as a litigator. Not necessarily because I'm great at it or anyone else thinks I should. Just because *I* want to.

(The kicker, of course, is that I declare interest in being a litigator and everyone's like, Oh, sure, that's cool. If I said I wanted to do transactional, they'd say the same thing. Because no one else is expecting me to wait for a sign from the universe. That's just me.)

So that's where I am at the moment.

Having said this, I'm now probably destined to write construction contracts for the rest of my life...