As I watch my husband spend 14 hours a day this summer preparing to take the bar exam, I am arriving at Whatsthepointsville every day. He is plugging away through the material from a review course, lecture after lecture while he completes 90 page worksheets with fill-in-the blank spaces, similar to what my 7th grade social studies teacher gave me to outline textbook chapters. Things I cannot for the life of me remember when I’m playing Trivial Pursuit. Last night we went to Target so he could buy flashcards. He just completed the lecture on “Success” on the exam, and no joke (see photo) he had to fill in the following: Key to Success: Memorization!!!
My husband is one of the smartest people I know, but far greater than his ability to memorize are his abilities to analyze, research, and synthesize. I don’t ever plan on needing a lawyer, but I know that if I ever do in my taxonomy of essential skills for someone defending me, I would value analysis and synthesis as much higher commodities than memorizing. At no time in my husband’s life is anyone ever going to hold a gun to his head and demand to know something about torts. If he needs to know something about torts he doesn’t remember, he’ll do what anybody does, he’ll look it up.
When I saw Will Richardson speak in the fall he took out his cell phone and reminded us that students now have all the world’s information in their pocket. Sentimentality, he suggested, is why school has yet to change. Do we really need to memorize anything anymore? I suppose I want CPR committed to memory. I’ll have my own children learn their multiplication tables. It’s nice if certain professionals, like doctors, can do a procedure in an emergency without googling it first. But, in every day life I like it when my doctor sits at the computer and looks up information. Like my order at a restaurant, I would prefer my diagnosis is right, not just impressively produced from memory.
I am trying to contribute to an educational paradigm shifting to meet the needs of modern learners by allowing them to have choice, create, utilize passion, leverage technology, and take the driver’s seat, while I watch someone I love wading through an antiquated system. It serves as a central reminder for why I care about the things I do.
Sadly, despite attending one of the best law schools in the world, many of my husband’s classes were disappointingly one-sided lectures graded solely on a single 100% exam. The best experiences, the ones that inspired him, kept him up late at night thinking and really believing in things like justice, and the law, those were the clerkships, internships, clinics – the places where the professors were working with the students and coaching them to do real hands-on work that mattered.
There is some forward momentum in a few states beginning to explore other ways to license their lawyers. This New York Times article highlights some new ideas along with the backlash when last year’s crop of prospective lawyers had record low scores on the exam. You can also read a bit about how this right of passage is not just embedded into the sentimentality of the profession, but also, somewhat obviously, into the pocketbook of the associations as well.
25 of our 44 presidents have been lawyers (I didn’t have that memorized, I had to look it up). This is a profession that wields influence in our democracy, and as a direct result can have an impact on education. What if the bar was set higher for them, preparing them for the deep complex thinking and analysis necessary in their profession?
My husband is one of the smartest people I know, but far greater than his ability to memorize are his abilities to analyze, research, and synthesize. I don’t ever plan on needing a lawyer, but I know that if I ever do in my taxonomy of essential skills for someone defending me, I would value analysis and synthesis as much higher commodities than memorizing. At no time in my husband’s life is anyone ever going to hold a gun to his head and demand to know something about torts. If he needs to know something about torts he doesn’t remember, he’ll do what anybody does, he’ll look it up.
When I saw Will Richardson speak in the fall he took out his cell phone and reminded us that students now have all the world’s information in their pocket. Sentimentality, he suggested, is why school has yet to change. Do we really need to memorize anything anymore? I suppose I want CPR committed to memory. I’ll have my own children learn their multiplication tables. It’s nice if certain professionals, like doctors, can do a procedure in an emergency without googling it first. But, in every day life I like it when my doctor sits at the computer and looks up information. Like my order at a restaurant, I would prefer my diagnosis is right, not just impressively produced from memory.
I am trying to contribute to an educational paradigm shifting to meet the needs of modern learners by allowing them to have choice, create, utilize passion, leverage technology, and take the driver’s seat, while I watch someone I love wading through an antiquated system. It serves as a central reminder for why I care about the things I do.
Sadly, despite attending one of the best law schools in the world, many of my husband’s classes were disappointingly one-sided lectures graded solely on a single 100% exam. The best experiences, the ones that inspired him, kept him up late at night thinking and really believing in things like justice, and the law, those were the clerkships, internships, clinics – the places where the professors were working with the students and coaching them to do real hands-on work that mattered.
There is some forward momentum in a few states beginning to explore other ways to license their lawyers. This New York Times article highlights some new ideas along with the backlash when last year’s crop of prospective lawyers had record low scores on the exam. You can also read a bit about how this right of passage is not just embedded into the sentimentality of the profession, but also, somewhat obviously, into the pocketbook of the associations as well.
25 of our 44 presidents have been lawyers (I didn’t have that memorized, I had to look it up). This is a profession that wields influence in our democracy, and as a direct result can have an impact on education. What if the bar was set higher for them, preparing them for the deep complex thinking and analysis necessary in their profession?