May 12 2008

I Never Much Liked Standup Comedy (Or: Save It for the Stage, Gallagher!)(Or: No Really – Sometimes We Really Do Have To Teach Ourselves the Course)

I’ve come to realize a lot of professors (maybe all of them?) seriously chafe at the phrase, “I had to teach this course to myself.” And I can understand why. Here you have a professor who has studied longer and who has earned more degrees than the students – who has prepared (I use that term rather loosely in some cases) a syllabus and chosen a book – and who has come to class day in, day out, and done their best (I hesitate to use this term at all in some other cases) to teach you something. And what do they get? Told by their students that they really didn’t teach at all.

In all honesty, a lot of time that phrase is uttered in empty frustration, and beneath it lies not the fact that the professor didn’t teach, but only the fact that the students feel they didn’t learn very much, which may very well be due to a number of variables too numerous to discuss. And a lot of times, what students are griping about is little more than the unthinkable fact that they had to work really hard to understand a concept that was never easy for anyone to explain/understand, and their professor hasn’t made it the essence of clarity either.

But then there are those classes you really do teach to yourself, and I have been privileged enough to have taken such a course.

Let me say from the outset: I gave up on this course early on (about week 5), attended only because each attendance was mandatory in the syllabus, and used my class time to vastly improve my Scrabble game. I admit this straight out, right here, from the beginning.

But why did I – a pretty darn studious nerd by most standards – give up on a course so early and to such an extent? And where do I get off telling an expert in the given field that I had to teach the course to myself?

Well, to start with, I never much cared for standup comedy. I mean, I used to like watermelon-smashing Gallagher back in the day, but aside from him, standup comics never really held my attention very well. When the standup comic is my law professor, the result is just disastrous. Don’t get me wrong: I think my previous blogs have made my preference for comedic relief pretty evident, and I love when a professor is a funny professor as well as a good one. But when the professor is only funny…

The first few days of this particular course were darn funny. We liked this professor. This professor amused us. But then we all started to realize we were really only being amused, and this course was a little lacking in substance. Actually…no…it was a LOT lacking in substance. And this book was a wretched plague upon humanity (I submit that no book should be 1/3 text, 1/3 parenthetical phrases, and 1/3 footnotes. NO BOOK. EVER. It’s evil and vile and wrong.) so no help there. And… wait… did the professor just start blatantly substituting opinion for fact…? Oh my. I know that isn’t what the Court held… Maybe it’s what you think it should have held… But… Um… It didn’t. For the sake of my own GPA, I think this would be a good time to tune this one out.

Scrabble, anyone? Yes, indeed. And this time, I wasn’t playing against the slackers. Oh no! I was playing against the top brass, kids. The cream of the crop. The presidents, the editors, and the holders of really impressive GPAs. We had all given up.

But the proof is in the pudding, as they say, and my proof that I really did have to teach this course to myself (and that I could, which amused me terrifically) came during the days leading up the exam. I was sent an outline by a student who had clearly done nothing but transcribe everything our amusing professor said. I read this outline to see if I had, in fact, missed anything important in those mandatory lost hours. Beneath the tears of laughter streaming down my face was the realization that this entire outline – a loose transcription of the entire course – was just pure gibberish. It made NO logical sense. Something to do with an eight-year old… everything is “clearly” this or that, except that it’s all about as clear as mud… oh, wait… now something to do with due process of law…grandmothers…hookers… were the grandmothers also the hookers…? I passed this outline around to my friends – also rather studious types – and watched as their eyes grew wide and they started doubling over in laughter (well, those of them that didn’t leap to their feet to find the poor person who was perhaps relying on these 30 pages of total bunk).

And then we all got to the tedious act of starting all over from scratch – the much-debated outline of one of my favorite profs in-hand of course (which saved my butt, thank you very much) – and teaching the course to ourselves. We went to Westlaw and printed the syllabi of every main case (a daunting list). We put them in binders. We read them start to finish. We made them into chronological lists to see patterns over time (our book liked to talk in chronology but have us read the cases from the middle outward in all directions). We printed law review articles covering the policies behind the more prominent cases. We debated the pros and cons. We made mock tests for each other based off other (reliable) outlines and supplements. We read other texts and mountains of cram books. And in four days, we taught ourselves the basics of the course. And I’m pretty sure my friends and I passed (perhaps only by the Grace of God, but we passed).

I’m told this sort of occurrence – standup comedy in lieu of teaching – happens as a result of knowing one’s subject so well, and having written so many books containing naught but your own opinion on the subject, that, when teaching, one forgets to mention the rule to which one’s opinion applies. One neglects to account for the fact that most students can’t really debate the subtleties of the policies behind a rule until they, you know, know the rule. And one perhaps forgets that one’s own opinion is not how it is, no matter how much that’s how one believes it should be.

So when your students tell you they had to teach a course to themselves, keep this little diatribe in mind. I’m sure the vast majority of you will immediately defer to my blog about whiny students, assured as you are that your teaching prowess is second-to-none and certainly a lot better than Gallagher standup. But if perchance you should have a doubt or two, here remains a little food for thought.

Comments Off on I Never Much Liked Standup Comedy (Or: Save It for the Stage, Gallagher!)(Or: No Really – Sometimes We Really Do Have To Teach Ourselves the Course)

Comments are closed at this time.