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Category Archives: Teaching

Piles o’ Paper

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Last Thursday I received about 133 papers from students in my three classes.  Over the four days since I’ve read and graded all of them.  I’ve graded at my desks at BU and home, on four different sofas in two houses, at two kitchen tables, and in the car going to and from Maine.  (I was not driving.)  I’ve graded early in the morning and late at night.  I’ve tried to be consistent.  After I read the first 30 or so papers in the largest group I realized I needed to be more flexible, so I graded the final 80 papers accordingly and went back and up-graded the first 30.  My goal has been to return these papers today, which kept me on task and lowered the priority of everything else such as responding to emails, reading the paper, writing recommendation letters, and sending birthday greetings.  Now I get to catch up although there’s another 20-30 papers coming in today.  Grading is the chore we like least but rewarding, too, and not just because I make two big checks on my to do list.  I learn a great deal about my students through grading these papers, about how they think, what they connect with, and what they miss.  It’s humbling to realize that matters I thought I made clear remain murky and deeply satisfying to see students make connections between disparate concepts.

All of which is an indirect way of saying if my communications are tardy I have a good excuse and I’ll make it up.  Soon.  Right after I finish the next group of papers.

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Starting Over

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Today, the second day of the semester, I was not in the classroom.  I held office hours.  It was a spectacularly beautiful late summer day.   Judy and Josh were at Fenway watching the Sox come from behind in a 5-4 walk-off win against the Orioles while I sat in my airless office 400 hundred yards away, listening to game audio over the Internet.  I had few walk-ins and was able to read some articles, write a post, handle some administrative chores, and work on the AFC Legal Resources site.  About 2:30  I was logy and went to the SMG Starbucks on the second floor.  Only a half-dozen tables were occupied and I did not recognize anyone.  That’s the September Story.  Hundreds of the familiar faces I would have seen last April have graduated and gone, new seniors are working, looking for jobs, or otherwise occupied off campus, dozens of juniors are abroad, and it’s too soon to know many of my first-time students.  It hits me each September that we have to start again to build relationships, get beyond facades, forge the personal links that make teaching an emotionally satisfying pursuit.  Soon when I enter Starbucks and walk the halls this feeling of re-generation will have passed but, this week, it defines my relationship to the school.

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Pomp & Circumstance

Saturday, May 17, 2008

6:00 AM, Logan Airport, Terminal B, Gate 34, awaiting boarding of AA #1909 to Miami. I’m missing tomorrow’s BU graduation to attend my oldest son’s graduation from law school. We happened to park in Garage B location 3L. Third-year law student? He is the third lawyer in our family? Quite portentous.

Congratulations to all graduating seniors. I’m sorry I won’t see you tomorrow as you cross the stage to receive your (empty) diploma case and shake the Dean’s hand. I wish you all the best. Stay in touch.

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Classroom Distractions

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Some time ago I wrote about the use of laptops in the classroom, a post prompted by law school professors banning laptops because of their deleterious effect on class discussion. I said then I would not ban them. In my pre-computer college and law school days I never lacked for classroom distractions. I could miss an entire lecture armed with nothing but a pen and paper. A laptop is more engrossing than a surreptitious game of hangman, I know, but boring classes are the biggest culprit.

A reader who recalled that discussion sent me a link to Surfing the Class from the May 13 New York Times, which notes that the the U Chicago Law School dean “has recently announced an end to classroom surfing.” Henceforth laptops are only to be used to take notes during class. That oughta stop it. Maybe he can also announce an end to people speaking too loudly on cellphones in restaurants or on public transit.

I think classroom laptop use is more prevalent in law school than in the BU School of Management. Rarely do more than ten percent of students use a laptop in class, and usually the number is less. My attitude has not changed. As long as it does not distract either their classmates or me, it is the laptop user’s choice to spend their class time and tuition reading email or booking flights for spring break. My job is to make the classroom experience so interesting that they don’t want to miss it–which, I’ll hasten to add, is a statement of aspiration, not a description of reality. Law students are adults and, in my view, are responsible for their own choices. Undergraduate students are, initially, not as adult as they would like to believe but have earned the title by their senior year, for chronological reasons if no other.

If students complained that someone’s in-class web browsing detracted from their ability to pay attention then I would banish the laptop users to the back row. In ten years of teaching I’ve received only one complaint about laptop use in the classroom, from a student distracted by keyboard noise. I required all students using laptops to sit together one side of the classroom, and checked periodically with nearby students whether the laptop ghetto distracted them. It didn’t, and everyone was happy.

Maybe this fall I’ll be preemptive and designate the back row for laptop users, unless they promise not to distract others by browsing.

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Wiki project post-mortem

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Students in this semester’s real estate law and Internet law courses created projects for the wiki related to this blog. It was an experiment on many levels, from how to integrate the projects and courses to how, mechanically, to create, edit, and post a wiki article. I used the TikiWiki platform, the learning curve for which I started to climb only a few weeks before the semester began. By the end of the first week I scrapped that plan that a team of students would prepare one project each week and adopted the plan used to settle the western states in the 19th century: line everyone up at the border, say “go!”, and sort it all out when the dust settles. The students were incredibly good sports. Literally, they were working with a blank slate. There were no existing projects to provide clues about topic, length, approach, format–anything. I purposely provided an open-ended description, as is my wont, to encourage a range of topics. Article creation involved many misadventures, with students posting their new articles into existing articles (thank you, roll-back function), into the site welcome page (thank you, roll-back and page lock functions), and sometimes piling new articles onto the deleted bodies of older articles. That’s testimony to the non-intuitive nature of wiki document creation and my failure to conduct a Wiki 101 course. It all sorted out in the end. There are some great articles, many good articles that provide an excellent foundation for future work, and I made enough mistakes to make me much wiser for next semester.

The first decision I made for the future is not to require both a wiki project and research paper. In the future they’ll be combined somehow. The second decision is to find a new platform. I’ve developed some fondness for TikiWiki because I spent so much damned time learning how to use it (I still have much to learn) but most students are understandably unwilling to climb a steep learning curve to complete a course assignment. I was also never enthusiastic about the appearance of the site, despite fiddling with different themes and settings. Right now I’m looking at Drupal, an open-source content management platform. It is not a wiki, although users can be enabled to create, revise, and comment on content through its robust permissions feature. Drupal is quite robust throughout, in fact. It has a professional look and feel that gives me comfort–although I am mindful that I may be succumbing to the feelings described in the post the precedes this. There are a number of impressive third-party modules to add features and utilities beyond those available on the wiki. Over the summer I’ll select and configure a platform, import articles from the wiki, and organize my online course resources to have the new site ready for the fall.

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Groundhog Year

Friday, May 2, 2008

If I am asked to deliver a graduation speech I am likely to expound on Groundhog Day as a metaphor for teaching. Bill Murray plays a weatherman who lives the same day countless times. He wakes at 6:00 AM to the radio playing “I Got You Babe”, has the same conversation with the proprietor of the B & B, runs into the same insurance salesman, again and again and again. It is a fresh new day for everyone but him. He relives the day until he gets it right, becomes a better person and wins Andie MacDowell’s heart.

It’s just like teaching, minus Andie MacDowell and the groundhog. Every semester we relive our courses, discuss the same concepts, ask and answer the same questions, travel the same path, always trying to get it right. I do, sometimes, for a question, a discussion, even an entire class period, but it is hard to maintain. I have too little coffee or too much, I’m distracted by a pencil rat-tat-tatting on a desk, students are flat from the previous night’s brutal accounting exam. By April I am deconstructing the academic year and by May I am eviscerating my syllabi and rebuilding. If I come closer to getting it right for the year than I did before I am not too hard on myself. I don’t know the payoff if I get it right. Bill Murray’s payoff was waking up with Andie MacDowell on February 3rd. Mine will be waking up in September with 50-odd students waiting to discover the law.

I thought about this as I drove to Maine this evening. I wanted to be on the road by 2:00 PM but missed. I left home at 4:30, sailed north five exits on Route 95, then hit traffic that crawled all the way to the 95/128 north split. What should have taken 22 minutes took an hour. I was eager to arrive. Our Massachusetts home, in the midst of a complete kitchen overhaul, is dusty, gritty, and disordered, any of which by itself would make me cranky. Judy is in Italy for two weeks, I’m eating microwaved food, and I’ve been at my desk for weeks grading papers and wiki projects. Leaving at 4:30 it was likely I’d get stuck in traffic but the alternative was to leave later and review wiki projects for another couple of hours. I chose the traffic.

I arrived shortly before 8:00. I let the dogs out of the car, as always, when I opened the driveway gate. In the time it took to drive the final 150 yards Cleo located a stick and Chelsey a tennis ball, both buried by snow since last December. It was light enough to walk along the lake and inspect winter tree damage, nothing significant. The dogs retrieved from the lake, close-in tosses only. Every day is Groundhog Day for dogs. Rise, eat, poop, sleep, bark, run, sleep, bark, eat, poop, sleep. They always get it right.

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Once a week

Friday, May 2, 2008

“What’s the deal with these once a week posts?” you might ask. Me too. Blame it on the idiot who assigned 100+ papers and wiki projects to all come due and require grading in the last few weeks of the semester. Bad blog form, I know. Mea culpa.

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Quality Conversations

Friday, February 29, 2008

Interesting, thoughtful, and articulate student-driven discussion threads have developed on a number of recent posts. I need to generate new posts regularly to keep up with them.

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Course wiki projects

Friday, January 25, 2008

Wednesday night I had dinner at Stella in the South End with my former business partner. We dissolved our financial advisory business in 1999 when we both started teaching full-time, me at BU School of Management and David in a Boston public school. He and his family have been in New Delhi for eighteen months where his wife took an assignment for her company and David played golf and taught in an American school. He related how his 10th-grade English students engaged in “deep reading” of classic literature–that is, reading, thinking, and making marginal notes in the velo-bound public-domain works he assembled for them–and turned Agamemnon into a play about a high-stakes soccer match between bitter foes that they then performed for classes of 6th-graders. These experiences echoed the written case assignments and wiki content creation I’ve introduced into some of my courses. Make someone write about what they read, make them find creative ways to engage with the course material, and they will understand it more fully.

The wiki assignments are new to real estate law and Internet law this semester. I want another vehicle for student engagement that can tap into and capture how they learn and create a repository of resources for current and future classmates. This week I sketched out rough ideas for how students might use the wiki with no sense of how they would react to them, and asked for volunteers to create the first projects. It has only been a few days but so far I am pleased. Their initial ideas have outstripped my thinking about what they might do. It proves to me again that the best ideas come from students.

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