The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

Haven't we already had this discussion? It's come up again because Georgetown law prof David Cole wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post declaring how obnoxious he'd been, and then bragging about why he was right to have been so obnoxious. His particular form of obnoxiousness: banning laptops from his classroom.

Lots of law profs linked to said article on their blogs. I chimed in with a comment on the post on the Volokh conspiracy because I read Jonathan Adler's post on the subject as a little too admiring of Cole's act.

2 points:

One, that I did 5 out of 6 semesters with a laptop. I did one without. It's probably true that I paid a bit more attention during the handwriting semester, but when it came to studying for the final my chicken-scratches were useless. I had to get copies of notes from my friends - who'd typed them.

Secondly, particularly given how one's future career and earning power as a lawyer correlates to how one performed on their exams, a professor would have some nerve setting up roadblocks to prevent students from using the learning tools they need to succeed.

I've become particularly sensitive to that latter point, given all the job posts I see where only people in the very top of the class rank are invited to apply. It's stupid that grades matter so much, but since they do, it's extremely wrong for professors to interfere with students' abilities to get good ones, in this case by meddling with their learning processes. Not everyone learns the same, but Cole is quite candid in admitting that one of his goals in banning laptops is to destroy certain study mechanisms - particularly those involving verbatim notes. For many students - myself included - verbatim notes are essential when it comes time to study for the final exam. But as other commenters pointed out, banning laptops and the transcription abilities they afford to the notetakers who need them simply punishes those students and rewards the ones with better memories. Is that really how grades should be awarded? Isn't analysis supposed to be key? Note how many law school exams are "open book" and permit notes to be brought in. Clearly memorization is not the prized skill. Also how are people even going to have decent notes to bring in if they are not able to capture the information as it comes? The "pie in the sky" answer might be that students should take good notes when they do the reading at home, and/or immediately after class, and instead sit in rapt attention while in class, but anyone who thinks this might be an achievable ideal has clearly never been a modern law student laboring under a typically demanding schedule.

As a teacher myself, I do understand the frustrations that professors might have when faced with potential indifference from their students. In law school today that tends to take the form of Internet surfing and Solitaire, but it used to be doodling and crossword puzzles. But the solution to this problem is a change in pedagogy. Large law classrooms may simply not provide the kind of dynamic environment where class participation is helpful for learning. Small seminars may be another story, and I have less of an issue with laptops being banned there since it's much more clear that the educational benefit is derived from your own, as well as others', participation. But class participation in large classrooms is not nearly as helpful to others, nor is it necessarily helpful to yourself. In fact, I think it could actually be harmful to a student's exam performance.

I've always tended to be a hand-raiser, and in public school as a kid it may well have been helpful for my learning. Participating certainly did engage me. Participating in law school also engaged me. But in law school it wasn't enough to be engaged. To an extent, it wasn't even important. It was even potentially detrimental, at least to me. When I'm engaged I tend to think very broadly. I really want to understand the big picture and know how everything is supposed to fit together. In the long run I think I'll be a better legal scholar and practitioner for having approached the material that way, but in the meantime it hurt my grades. I've talked before about why I'm disappointed in my 1L grades, and I still stand by my frustration with my roommate, who clearly sapped all the energies I needed to succeed that year. But on retrospect I also recognize that there were certain things I just wasn't getting. Take Constitutional Law, for instance - which, incidentally, was a class where no one dared indulge in distractions lest risk getting eaten for lunch by a Paper Chase-like professor. I was there every day, paying the utmost attention, but having now sat through two separate Chemerinsky Con Law lectures in preparation for the bar, I recognize that there were things I just did not understand from my 1L class. I was thinking about everything on much too high a level and didn't catch all the specifics I was supposed to later put on my test. I would have been much better off in that regard had I focused more on what the professor had actually said, instead of the discussion he was trying to foster. The latter might have been interesting, revealing, and food for thought for a long time hence, but thinking along those lines without having first caught the basics is a bit like trying to fly before you've built the airplane.

In any case, this post is a caution against the delusion that professors can or should so strictly micromanage their students' learning. This caution applies specifically to laptop policies, but it could also apply more generally. With lecture classes holding dozens and dozens of students, each with their own learning styles and learning objectives, professors run the risk of interfering with their students' education, rather than enhancing it, with one-size-fits-all policies and practices.