I would be happy to teach a course for prospective teachers about how to fix law school, which I have thought a good deal about, but I would rather teach a course for prospective lawyers about how to find for yourself interesting and socially-valuable ways to practice law. As it happens, that's the course you're enrolled in. How about we do that work together this semester, and later, if you're still interested, we'll do that other work when we've got the prerequisites?

Recognition leads me to an exploration of finding out precisely what is wrong with our law school structure and culture. Only then can we find exactly what needs to be done to produce change. As Jonathon and Justin mentioned, class size seems to play a part. But then I must ask, do schools such as Yale or Vanderbilt have a more nurturing, educational, and desirable experience? Perhaps, but what else stifles exhange? If we hired more bodies to stand in front of a room would all our problems be solved? Additionally, what negative repercussions would this have? A dearth of public-speaking skill comes to mind.

I believe professors' engagement is also vital. Required office hours are not sufficient; genuine feeling and empathy facilitate "opening-up" and enable similar feelings among our classmates. Too often have I felt that my professors did not have our best interests at heart.

Maybe I am (we are) very far off in finding the best law school structure. Maybe an entire overhaul of the methodology and configuration is necessary. Even so, at this stage in the analysis we must determine what is wrong and what needs to be done.

-- KeithEdelman - 05 Feb 2009

Regarding the cost/benefit analysis, I think you are forgetting the biggest benefit you get from speaking up by far (as far as I'm concerned): Memorization. Once you speak in class, the class becomes alive for you; you may forget what others said, but not your contribution and the discussion you had. We remember only 20-30% of what we hear as see, but about 50-60% of what we say and write (that's a statistic I learned a while ago, the numbers might be wrong, but you get the idea). The class is alive for you, you delve into the material. It's the difference of seeing an event on TV and being there. It also commits you to a point of view; and it is shown that once committed to anything, there is a large psychological force requiring one to stay consistent with the committed view. You may have to review your ideas later, but most importantly, this engages you in debate. Which is where the fun is.

-- TheodorBruening - 03 Feb 2009

A note on what Professor Moglen just said:

"According to most studies, people's number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than doing the eulogy."
- Jerry Seinfeld

-- TheodorBruening - 03 Feb 2009

Jon, I think you’re very correct that class size has a lot to do with how much people raise their hand in class. One thing about larger classes is that more of your hand-raising time is going to answering rather than asking. In general, the vast majority of times that people speak in class it is to answer a question, but I’ve found that this gets more and more true the larger and larger the class gets. Freshman year of undergrad I had a bunch of 500+ person classes and no-one ever raised their hand then. It’s scarier to answer than to question, although personally I’ve probably been embarrassed more by asking stupid questions then being wrong. The semi-painful silences in classes come when people aren’t answering, not when there’s no questions.

Somewhat related to this, I really like Keith’s phrase “fears of continued abstract exploration weigh down a desire to speak” and feel that it is very relevant to this class in particular. I’m a good deal more intimidated of Prof. Moglen than the other professors I’ve had so far. You can characterize this as my embarrassment cost being high or whatnot. I don’t want to answer when I kinda feel like I know what’s going on because I don’t want to go down some road where my lack of understanding is exposed. I definitely don’t want to ask a question that is quickly and definitively deemed useless for reasons I don’t get.

Lotta “I” in that last paragraph. Anyways, I don’t believe that completely understanding why you’re afraid to talk in class is necessarily all that useful if your goal is to try to talk more. I can spend a long time figuring out that I hate spiders cause my sister dropped one in my crib but this doesn’t make me less afraid of them (not the best analogy maybe).

Possible things to try if you just really want to speak and to get comfortable with it:

• If you have a question, write it down and force yourself to ask it in the beginning during question time.
• Get to know people in the class better so you’re less afraid they’ll think you’re an idiot/douchebag when you talk.
• Piggy-back on someone else’s answer/question.
• Read one part really really well and raise your hand when we get to that part.
• Post on here about how you’re definitely going to say SOMETHING next time and hope that fear of shame will force your hand to go up.
• Imagine everyone in their underwear.

Dunno if that’s what you’re looking for, and it definitely wasn’t what you asked for, but it was helpful to me to try and think stuff up 

-- JustinChung - 02 Feb 2009

-- JustinChung - 03 Feb 2009

That weird symbol at the end was supposed to be a smiley face, btw.

-- JustinChung? - 03 Feb 2009

-- JustinChung - 03 Feb 2009