Also from the Marquette law school blog:
Is anybody out there?
My god, when I was in law school, the last person I wanted to hear from was another law student. You don't pay $25K a year to put up with that unedifying chatter, when there is a nationally recognized scholar at the front of the room for only an hour or two a week.
You want law students making noise, go to the library.
This is what led the ephebeia to concurrent discoveries of hippie lettuce and dormsuite dialectic in 320 BCE.
ReplyDeleteNo kidding. Perhaps I'm too egotistical but ... when I was in graduate school, there were very few moments where I figured that I would benefit from listening to my classmates blather on about a subject. Either my professor was going to give me the goods, or I was smart enough to figure it out on my own (or, I already knew it and didn't need my inferiors killing my all important brain cells with their inane chatter).
ReplyDeleteAnd when it actually is a nationally recognized scholar, most law students participate appropriately, or at least learn. You don't hear those kind of complaints in a Blinka class, for example. But not all the professors there -- and I'm thinking of a couple of adjuncts, primarily -- have any idea how to teach, and I admit that sometimes I've gotten more from a student reframing of the question than I did the professor's analysis.
ReplyDeleteBesides, you rip on Rick Esenberg quite a bit on your blog (though I'm not passing judgment on that; I agree with much of what you respond with). How would you feel about the topic of student participation if you were in one of his classes?
The same. My experience was that all of the professors were (and presumably still are) highly amenable to shooting the shit in their offices after class, and I tried to take advantage of that.
ReplyDeleteThat whole block on the second floor, for example: Calboli, O'Hear, Idleman, Madry, all extremely welcoming. And I could go on, obviously. I have nothing but respect for those people.
(By the way I did have Esenberg for a class at UWM, way back when. And I even went to harass him in his office at Marquette a few months ago. I like him; he's a good guy.)