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Let's conduct a thought experiment. "If someone you loved were entering as a 1L in September of 2008, how would you help that person do better than you did?"
Pretend that the person you love wants out of law school the same thing you wanted out of law school. Multiple suggestions, multiple comment boxes. |
| | I define "doing better" as "minimizing the effort to get good grades," hypothesizing that confidence in one's future grades impacts happiness, ability to learn, and all the other qualities of life. |
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< | Your learning will comprise two functions: paraphrasing, into your own words, the primary sources (syllabus & lecture) and the secondary sources (G-drive outlines). |
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> | Your learning will comprise two functions: paraphrasing, into your own words, the primary sources (syllabus & lecture) and paraphrasing, into your own words, the secondary sources (G-drive outlines). |
| | Lesson 1: Only bother with the primary sources when they differ from the secondary sources. If you find good G-Drive outlines, you'll rarely need to take class notes, because your teacher's lecture will differ little from past years' outlines; and you'll only need to read a few cases -- won't even need to buy a casebook -- if you find your syllabus fully represented there.
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< | Holmes said that "The law consists of that paraphrase of Precedent that a judge is most likely to utter." (j/k.)
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> | Holmes said that "The law consists of that paraphrase of Precedent that a judge is most likely to utter." (To paraphrase.)
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- the professor is a common-law Judge,
- each day's lecture is a Precedent,
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- the exam is the paraphrase of lectures that the professor is most likely to generate.
- We can approximate the most probable exam as the one which a person empathizing with the professor is most likely to write.
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- the [exam] is the paraphrase of [lectures] that the [professor] is most likely to generate.
- Students can approximate the most probable exam as the one which a student empathizing with the professor is most likely to write.
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| | Lesson 2: DO NOT attempt to empathize with the professor privately; empathy is a relative term, a social construct, a function of the curve. |
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- Define a person empathizing with the professor in terms of how your peers empathize with your professor.
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- Define a student empathizing with the professor in terms of how your peers empathize with your professor.
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- Do this either by forming a study group (present classmates), or by using multiple G-drive outlines (past classmates).
Information equals ordered data. In principle, one single document could come into being that permits future students to empathize with and predict the professor without buying a casebook or transcribing a word of lecture. My outlines for Contracts and Civil Procedure, combining the best of six G-Drive outlines, might permit a student to do this. I plan to contribute them to the G-Drive. |
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< | But that's part of the problem: the addition of outlines makes it MORE difficult for future 1Ls to qualify all the data. If our goal is to provide the 1L with more information and less data, we should lower the costs to him of identifying information. We must identify for him a Maxwell's Demon with the incentive to cull the data from the information. |
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> | But that's part of the problem: the addition of outlines makes it MORE difficult for future 1Ls to qualify all the data. If our goal is to provide the 1L with more information and less data, we should lower the costs to him of identifying information. We must identify for him a Maxwell's Demon that has the incentive to weed the data from the information. |
| | Suppose a CLS Wiki. Not a free-for-all Wiki, like this one. Instead, each teaching assistant gets her own real estate; everyone else gets various posting rights in the neighboring real estate. The question is, What rights, and which people, do we assign to the respective pieces of real estate? |
| | Finally, I think focusing on grades at all is dangerous because of the curve. If a single person collaborates better with others, that person will likely learn more and get better grades. But, if the whole school begins to collaborate better together, then we'll all learn more, but none of us will get better grades. If collaboration is going to be the primary means, then the primary goal should be better learning and not better grades.
-- OluwafemiMorohunfola - 25 Apr 2008 |
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1) RE my "assumptions" 1 & 2 & 3: ...
... the perception that there's insufficient data / insufficient methods / insufficient intelligence can all be paraphrased as saying "there's sufficient data, methods and intelligence ... but not enough TIME." Someone investing the time (as I have done) into the G-Drive outlines can create that magic document; the criticism, which is a good one, is that this technique is not TIME-EFFECTIVE; but that's just to say that we need to outsource the process.
2) The curve is bullshit. Teachers could just as well grade us in absolute terms and then tweak the boundaries to conform to the curve. It makes sense: we're a motley bunch ... given a fair test, a random cross-section of 90 1Ls is going to conform to a curve.
Given that fact: More CONFIDENCE in grades is what I'm after, not better grades -- my goal is to make the content of the class (the object of empathy) more objective, less fuzzy, so that a bad grade can be defined in terms of "not learning material" rather than (as it currently is) "insufficient empathy."
-- AndrewGradman - 29 Apr 2008 |
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