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KhurramDaraSecondPaper 7 - 16 Jun 2012 - Main.EbenMoglen
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Why it's hard for me to be creative | | | It’s not that this process is entirely without any utility. It’s just that it requires little, if any creativity. This structure does do one thing very well--it makes us all really good, I mean really good, at following directions. Which means for most of our professional lives, our work will only be as good as the directions that precede it. | |
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You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
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> | So, now that you've been through the process so many times, and
floated to the top each time, what have you got left to prove? In
the military, fruit salad puts an officer's entire service history on
her uniform. Within a totalizing organization, where promotion is
the only form of career path possible, until it stops, that's the
whole story told precisely and completely.
But—here's where the creativity thing begins—human
society is not necessarily like the military. Your pathway isn't
linear like that any more. Only those who cannot tolerate the
complexity of making their own decisions must remain within the
boundary of directions. All others have a choice. The form the
choice takes is called "creativity." The most basic form creativity
takes is the creation of one's own life. This happens by conscious
transcendence of the patterns imposed by our insecurities, our
shames, and the unintended consequences of our past successful
efforts to mend our psychic wounds.
The ability to do creative lawyering—to make things happen in
society, using words, that haven't happened before—includes,
necessarily, the ability to perform that task for oneself, by making
a career happen in society, using words, that is not other-directed.
The crucial learning necessary is learning not to be afraid of
creating your own practice. It is not an exam. It is your practice.
You do write your own questions, by developing your various
expertises, and by choosing your clients. Your mistakes are scored
against you, and you try not to make any serious ones.
At the beginning, you need mentoring, which must come from the other
asset of your practice besides the license, which is your network.
Your network has to contain the necessary mentoring, delivered
usefully, to enable you to grow your practice at the beginning. You
should be expecting the law school, in return for the large amount of
borrowed money you are paying it, to help you build the network and
get the mentoring. (The best possible mentors would be powerful,
experienced, effective and respected leaders of the profession, who
might be expected to be the faculty. If not, at least the faculty
should be actively introducing you to them. What they ought _ not_
to be doing is hiding in their offices, demanding a "specific
question" at office hours, giving true/false final exams, writing
recommendation letters that reveal an absence of personal knowledge
of and contact with the student, etc.)
But you also need the inner freedom to create. That's made of
several important parts. You need to have been taught to put away
the fear of failure. You need to learn alertness to social phenomena
that could lead to expertise for you that would attract clients. You
must be able to communicate and collaborate effectively in
21st-century social conditions, using the new modes of social process
that have grown up in the brief life so far of the Net. You must
understand the fundamentals of independent professional life in the
"Internet society." You need teachers who can help you learn these
things.
The alternative you propose, that everyone will be part of
hierarchical organizations issuing orders for other-directed careers,
will not be available in your lifetime. That it has been available
is no guarantee of its continuance. You should not educate yourself
to play a role in that world, because you will find yourself unsuited
to the one in which you are actually going to live. | | | | |
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KhurramDaraSecondPaper 6 - 10 Jun 2012 - Main.KhurramDara
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Why it's hard for me to be creative | | | One of the overarching themes of our course is creativity. In some contexts, being creative helps us solve problems; in others it helps us achieve specific objectives. But creativity is a hard thing for us. Forget about making an impact on the world around us, it’s difficult for us to be creative enough to put a paper together. Most of us dread the thought of an assigned paper with no topic. Our reflection post in Constitutional Law asking us whether originalism is should or should not be used in judicial interpretation gives us no anxiety. That’s because the answers are in the book. There are arguments for it, and against it. And we choose some of these arguments, rephrase them, put “Khurram Dara Reflection Post #2” at the top, and call it a day. The extent of our creativity is how we get it done. Will it be in the 45 minutes before we go out on Thursday night? Or do we do the unthinkable and wake up early Friday morning and crank it out before the 10:40 am deadline? We prefer to not have to be creative. Imagine the sheer frustration and stress that would result if we were tested on creativity. Consider an exam, for example, with no question. Instructions indicating to us that we have three and half hours to write an essay on anything we’d like. As a 1L, there are few things that frighten me more.
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< | I remember Eben talking about law journals, saying that we probably wouldn’t care much for the work, but that we want the “fruit salad.” I think the “fruit salad” might be part of the reason we can’t, or rather, have a hard time being creative. It's a fixation with credentials. Everyone seems to be obsessed with “fruit salad,” at least with respect to education. When you’re a child, for some, it’s about which primary or secondary school you attend. The prestige is important. Once you’re in school, regardless of whether you’re in a private or a public school, “fruit salad” is very important. You want to be involved in a certain number of “extracurricular” activities, for your resume, of course. You want to have an impressive internship. You want to take the most “Advanced Placement” courses, and make the honor roll. It’s all about getting into the best college. So you’ll take a class or get a tutor to help you score however high it is you need to score on the SAT. You’ll read about what colleges look for, but everyone knows it’s about the numbers and the “fruit salad.” How many National Merit Scholarship recipients can the college say they admitted? How many valedictorians and salutatorians are in the freshman class? How many of the newly admitted students scored in the top 90th percentile on the SAT? In our case, as students with aspirations of attending professional school, it was the same thing all over again. We needed to get a certain LSAT score and have a certain GPA, and maybe, if our “fruit salad” was made from the freshest of fruits, it could help us out. It’s so the Columbia Law class profile can indicate how high our median LSAT score is, and so Dean Schizer can talk about how many Fulbright Scholars were in the entering class at his next fundraiser. And then we apply for jobs at big law firms. Who want to boast the number of federal clerks they hired, or how many former Harvard Law Review editors they employ. | >
> | I remember Eben talking about law journals, saying that we probably wouldn’t care much for the work, but that we want the “fruit salad.” I think the “fruit salad” might be part of the reason we can’t, or rather, have a hard time being creative. It's a fixation with credentials. Everyone seems to be obsessed with “fruit salad,” at least with respect to education. When you’re a child, for some, it’s about which primary or secondary school you attend. The prestige is important. Once you’re in school, regardless of whether you’re in a private or a public school, “fruit salad” is very important. You want to be involved in a certain number of “extracurricular” activities, for purposes of "building" your resume. You want to have an impressive internship. You want to take the most “Advanced Placement” courses, and make the honor roll. It’s all about getting into the best college. So you’ll take a class or get a tutor to help you score however high it is you need to score on the SAT. You’ll read about what colleges look for, but everyone knows it’s about the numbers and the “fruit salad.” How many National Merit Scholarship recipients can the college say they admitted? How many valedictorians and salutatorians are in the freshman class? How many of the newly admitted students scored in the top 90th percentile on the SAT? In our case, as students with aspirations of attending professional school, it was the same thing all over again. We needed to get a certain LSAT score and have a certain GPA, and maybe, if our “fruit salad” was made from the freshest of fruits, it could help us out. It’s so the Columbia Law class profile can indicate how high our median LSAT score is, and so Dean Schizer can talk about how many Fulbright Scholars were in the entering class at his next fundraiser. And then we apply for jobs at big law firms. Who want to boast the number of federal clerks they hired, or how many former Harvard Law Review editors they employ. | | | | |
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< | It’s not that this process is entirely without any utility. It’s just that it requires little, if any creativity. This structure does do one thing very well, however. It makes us all really good, I mean really good, at following directions. | >
> | It’s not that this process is entirely without any utility. It’s just that it requires little, if any creativity. This structure does do one thing very well--it makes us all really good, I mean really good, at following directions. Which means for most of our professional lives, our work will only be as good as the directions that precede it. | | |
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KhurramDaraSecondPaper 4 - 22 May 2012 - Main.KhurramDara
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Why it's hard for me to be creative
-- By KhurramDara - 24 Apr 2012 | |
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< | ***what you want to add here is something about the overemphasis on "credentials." But specify, "credentials" are important, but it depends what we mean by "credentials." The way they are used today, as my argument goes, they are not helpful, or at least, don't paint the big picture.
***also, probably need to come up with some sort of alternative to quantifiable credentials that makes sense. | | | One of the overarching themes of our course is creativity. In some contexts, being creative helps us solve problems; in others it helps us achieve specific objectives. But creativity is a hard thing for us. Forget about making an impact on the world around us, it’s difficult for us to be creative enough to put a paper together. Most of us dread the thought of an assigned paper with no topic. Our reflection post in Constitutional Law asking us whether originalism is should or should not be used in judicial interpretation gives us no anxiety. That’s because the answers are in the book. There are arguments for it, and against it. And we choose some of these arguments, rephrase them, put “Khurram Dara Reflection Post #2” at the top, and call it a day. The extent of our creativity is how we get it done. Will it be in the 45 minutes before we go out on Thursday night? Or do we do the unthinkable and wake up early Friday morning and crank it out before the 10:40 am deadline? We prefer to not have to be creative. Imagine the sheer frustration and stress that would result if we were tested on creativity. Consider an exam, for example, with no question. Instructions indicating to us that we have three and half hours to write an essay on anything we’d like. As a 1L, there are few things that frighten me more. | |
<
< | I remember Eben talking about law journals, saying that we probably wouldn’t care much for the work, but that we want the “fruit salad.” I think the “fruit salad” might be part of the reason we can’t, or rather, have a hard time being creative. Everyone seems to be obsessed with “fruit salad,” at least with respect to education. When you’re a child, for some, it’s about which primary or secondary school you attend. The prestige is important. Once you’re in school, regardless of whether you’re in a private or a public school, “fruit salad” is very important. You want to be involved in a certain number of “extracurricular” activities, for your resume, of course. You want to have an impressive internship. You want to take the most “Advanced Placement” courses, and make the honor roll. It’s all about getting into the best college. So you’ll take a class or get a tutor to help you score however high it is you need to score on the SAT. You’ll read about what colleges look for, but everyone knows it’s about the numbers and the “fruit salad.” How many National Merit Scholarship recipients can the college say they admitted? How many valedictorians and salutatorians are in the freshman class? How many of the newly admitted students scored in the top 90th percentile on the SAT? In our case, as students with aspirations of attending professional school, it was the same thing all over again. We needed to get a certain LSAT score and have a certain GPA, and maybe, if our “fruit salad” was made from the freshest of fruits, it could help us out. It’s so the Columbia Law class profile can indicate how high our median LSAT score is, and so Dean Schizer can talk about how many Fulbright Scholars were in the entering class at his next fundraiser. And then we apply for jobs at big law firms. Who want to boast the number of federal clerks they hired, or how many former Harvard Law Review editors they employ. | >
> | I remember Eben talking about law journals, saying that we probably wouldn’t care much for the work, but that we want the “fruit salad.” I think the “fruit salad” might be part of the reason we can’t, or rather, have a hard time being creative. It's a fixation with credentials. Everyone seems to be obsessed with “fruit salad,” at least with respect to education. When you’re a child, for some, it’s about which primary or secondary school you attend. The prestige is important. Once you’re in school, regardless of whether you’re in a private or a public school, “fruit salad” is very important. You want to be involved in a certain number of “extracurricular” activities, for your resume, of course. You want to have an impressive internship. You want to take the most “Advanced Placement” courses, and make the honor roll. It’s all about getting into the best college. So you’ll take a class or get a tutor to help you score however high it is you need to score on the SAT. You’ll read about what colleges look for, but everyone knows it’s about the numbers and the “fruit salad.” How many National Merit Scholarship recipients can the college say they admitted? How many valedictorians and salutatorians are in the freshman class? How many of the newly admitted students scored in the top 90th percentile on the SAT? In our case, as students with aspirations of attending professional school, it was the same thing all over again. We needed to get a certain LSAT score and have a certain GPA, and maybe, if our “fruit salad” was made from the freshest of fruits, it could help us out. It’s so the Columbia Law class profile can indicate how high our median LSAT score is, and so Dean Schizer can talk about how many Fulbright Scholars were in the entering class at his next fundraiser. And then we apply for jobs at big law firms. Who want to boast the number of federal clerks they hired, or how many former Harvard Law Review editors they employ. | | | It’s not that this process is entirely without any utility. It’s just that it requires little, if any creativity. This structure does do one thing very well, however. It makes us all really good, I mean really good, at following directions. |
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KhurramDaraSecondPaper 3 - 06 May 2012 - Main.KhurramDara
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Why it's hard for me to be creative
-- By KhurramDara - 24 Apr 2012 | |
>
> | ***what you want to add here is something about the overemphasis on "credentials." But specify, "credentials" are important, but it depends what we mean by "credentials." The way they are used today, as my argument goes, they are not helpful, or at least, don't paint the big picture.
***also, probably need to come up with some sort of alternative to quantifiable credentials that makes sense. | | | One of the overarching themes of our course is creativity. In some contexts, being creative helps us solve problems; in others it helps us achieve specific objectives. But creativity is a hard thing for us. Forget about making an impact on the world around us, it’s difficult for us to be creative enough to put a paper together. Most of us dread the thought of an assigned paper with no topic. Our reflection post in Constitutional Law asking us whether originalism is should or should not be used in judicial interpretation gives us no anxiety. That’s because the answers are in the book. There are arguments for it, and against it. And we choose some of these arguments, rephrase them, put “Khurram Dara Reflection Post #2” at the top, and call it a day. The extent of our creativity is how we get it done. Will it be in the 45 minutes before we go out on Thursday night? Or do we do the unthinkable and wake up early Friday morning and crank it out before the 10:40 am deadline? We prefer to not have to be creative. Imagine the sheer frustration and stress that would result if we were tested on creativity. Consider an exam, for example, with no question. Instructions indicating to us that we have three and half hours to write an essay on anything we’d like. As a 1L, there are few things that frighten me more.
I remember Eben talking about law journals, saying that we probably wouldn’t care much for the work, but that we want the “fruit salad.” I think the “fruit salad” might be part of the reason we can’t, or rather, have a hard time being creative. Everyone seems to be obsessed with “fruit salad,” at least with respect to education. When you’re a child, for some, it’s about which primary or secondary school you attend. The prestige is important. Once you’re in school, regardless of whether you’re in a private or a public school, “fruit salad” is very important. You want to be involved in a certain number of “extracurricular” activities, for your resume, of course. You want to have an impressive internship. You want to take the most “Advanced Placement” courses, and make the honor roll. It’s all about getting into the best college. So you’ll take a class or get a tutor to help you score however high it is you need to score on the SAT. You’ll read about what colleges look for, but everyone knows it’s about the numbers and the “fruit salad.” How many National Merit Scholarship recipients can the college say they admitted? How many valedictorians and salutatorians are in the freshman class? How many of the newly admitted students scored in the top 90th percentile on the SAT? In our case, as students with aspirations of attending professional school, it was the same thing all over again. We needed to get a certain LSAT score and have a certain GPA, and maybe, if our “fruit salad” was made from the freshest of fruits, it could help us out. It’s so the Columbia Law class profile can indicate how high our median LSAT score is, and so Dean Schizer can talk about how many Fulbright Scholars were in the entering class at his next fundraiser. And then we apply for jobs at big law firms. Who want to boast the number of federal clerks they hired, or how many former Harvard Law Review editors they employ.
It’s not that this process is entirely without any utility. It’s just that it requires little, if any creativity. This structure does do one thing very well, however. It makes us all really good, I mean really good, at following directions. |
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