[youtube]_wOUMd3bMRI[/youtube]

This movie was one of the reasons I went to law school.

And I *still* consider the first year of law school the toughest and most intellectually stimulating year of my life. Beat the crap out of the piling-higher-and-deeper experience.

I pretty much lived on ramen noodles, mac and cheese, and once-a-week all you could eat spaghettti for 2.99.

Of course most future lawyers hate that year. (Whcih I should have probably taken as a sign it was a bad career choice a bit sooner than I did.)

But I loved it.

I had a property law professor (Kingsfield, but without the asshole part) who I swear had the entire semester scripted out for anything that might come up in discussion. He played our 150-person class like a fiddle. We spent the first two weeks on one two-page case....and I think I probably read 3000 pages of outside reading. And that was one class out of 4.5.

I still track my admiration for Oliver Wendell Holmes to the Con Law class when, after I answered something with regard to one of his opinions, the prof paused and said, "Mr. Shilts. You know, I don't think I've ever heard anything so stupid in my career." I could *feel* all the students around me trying to establish extra distance between us. Hated that guy, but to this day when I'm arguing con law with some pinhead (i.e., current colleagues), I remember him talking about how this or that opinion was based on no identifiably consistent principles. And I think, boy, why couldn't I have figured that out back when he was teaching me. Because he's right over and over again.

Law school is a helluva expensive way to learn how to think. And law students can be about as obnoxious and arrogant as any group not holding the PhD. But damn I wish I could figure out how to bottle that kind of intellectual rigor so that it wasn't just the province of those wanting to become lawyers, politicians, and career bureaucrats. Who, if truth be told, most of it is wasted upon.

+1 to Foster for getting me all nostalgic.

You asshole.

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Oh, yes, and Kingsfield would not get tenured or promoted at a school like mine today. His approach to teaching is wholly against the prevailing ethos of "student centered" education that pervades schools who see their primary purpose as teaching undergraduates.

He could, of course, still get a job at a major research university. But at a "teaching institution", it's highly doubtful he'd last.

Because while 10-15 percent of his students would rave up and down about him, a full 25% to 50% would give him evaluations from bad to awful. And at our kind of school, good teaching evaluations are an essential requirement for promotion.

No matter that as survey documents, the best of those evaluation instruments would rate at best a C in quality of the survey design.

What I'm likely going to do about the various last minute excuses/nonexcuses:....give the students one opportunity to retake, but with a substantial automatic deduction (probably something like 25% of the points, but I'm waiting until I'm over my initial anger to decide). Given the test, and said students performance to date, my guess is that the best they are likely to get even with the extra time is a D.

Yeah, I know, wussy.

But, frankly, I'm in a position where I'm being very strategic about picking my battles nowadays. I waste my energy and superior epistemology on nabobs too much as it is.

My job, as I now see it, is to provide opportunities for learning. If a student chooses to ignore them, to waste them, well, in the end, it's their responsibility to drink the water that prepares them for life in a flat world.

Not mine.

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One other thing, on valid excuses and such.

I understand the tradeoffs working students face. My experience has been that students that work (as long as they aren't merely "work study" students who show up to work with the same irregularity that they show up to class) are rarely prone to give excuses. Most in fact expect no special consideration at all.

But at the same time, I tell my students at the beginning of every term, attending class is a choice that, like any choice, comes with consequences. If you believe something else is more important than my class, then you ought to skip. It's basic economic thinking.

But what you should not do is expect me to bear the consequences of your choice. I teach my classes not because students "pay" my salary. That's a myth (and, especially relevant to the classes I teach, bad economic thinking). I am not a tutor. I am an employee of one college, not an employee of seventy or more separate employers every term.) I teach because I believe it is necessary to provide quality opportunities to learn. If your job or your family is truly more important to you than my class's opportunities, then you should be willing to bear the consequences of missing those opportunities.

You. Not me.

It's my job to provide you opportunities in accordance with the terms of the syllabus and the course catalog. It's yours to decide which costs are worth incurring to realize the benefits of those opportunities. And then to bear them.

Not to expect to be able to shift their burden to someone else like me.

Very few teachers of my experience have a "no excuses" rule. Especially at schools like mine. Most of us tend to give too many alternative options rather than too few. I know I am way too soft a touch.

But whether we give alternatives or we don't, those alternatives are not a matter of right. If you want to get those kind of rights from me, you had better be willing to pay *me* serious tutor bucks. My time is double- and triple budgeted as it is.

Sorry....I guess I've gone off ranting and am starting to repeat myself. Enough of me on this one for awhile.

/end rant

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