Some Members of the Justice League of America
I am in the process of reviewing literature for a piece I am working on and hoping to publish that will examine the intersection between the movement to humanize legal education and the goal of supporting and retaining diversity in law school student bodies. On a related but somewhat more philosophical plane, I am interested in mapping how the discourse of law school shapes the self.
My psychic map of Yale Law School.
I recently re-connected with an old friend from law school. I mentioned to him my current work (trying to gain an understanding of the movement to humanize legal education), and how it was in large part inspired as an effort to heal my own experience of the disappointment and alienation I experienced in law school.
Tedium.
A student of mine commented on my last post that precise writing was “tedious but helpful”—a characterization I am quite pleased with. First, there is no shortage of tedium in the practice of law, and having the concentration and will to slog through it is an important attribute. Second, as a teacher, there is nothing that I would rather hear than that an exercise was helpful to the learning process.
Bad teacher.
By way of disclaimer: I am by all measures a novice teacher, having started my career at DU Law in the summer of 2007. In some ways, though, this may be an advantage in terms of learning about new teaching techniques, because in my inexperience I am very open to new ideas.
(The above image correlates, in the logic of a Google search, at least, with the concept of questioning authority. I leave it to you to draw your own connections.)
The focus of today’s post is not “questioning authority” in the sense of confronting government officials or performing acts of civil disobedience. Rather, I continue to question the role of authority in teaching, and, in particular, in law school teaching.
The author (right) as she appeared as a TA in law school, circa 1997.
So I have been thinking about hierarchy (a word that is difficult to spell) and authority in the law profession and, of course, here at law school.
We are discussing Larry Krieger’s booklet, “The Hidden Sources of Law School Stress.“
“Stress” = primarily images of white men and women in office settings clutching their brains. Ultimately, the head explodes.
Today I want to spend more time discussing the insights from Prof. Larry Krieger’s booklet, “The Hidden Sources of Law School Stress.“ It is an incredibly helpful resource in the battle to manage and reduce our overall levels of stress—primarily because it offers a different way of thinking about and analyzing the sources of stress in our education and career. For this reason, I would argue that it is a good resource for law students and practicing lawyers alike.
I am somewhat obsessed with the hidden cultural messages in the results of Google Images searches. There are any number of wonderful/horrible images associated with the word “stress,” but this has to be the most fantastic by far. Without bothering to find out why the image was actually there, I speculate: Is the cow stressed because he (no utter) is being required to perform outside of his natural environment? Or is this a happy heifer who has shed society’s expectations to pursue his dream? At any rate, it makes me laugh—a proven “stress-buster.”
This is a cute baby in a briefcase. He looks pretty happy.
I hope all of you are enjoying the long weekend, at some point taking the opportunity to do nothing at all. As Proust would attest, there are certain truths that only occur to us in moments of repose.
