But. It is time.

I graduated from Columbia in 1979. Because my family and I lived three blocks away from the campus, and we did not have the money for room and board, I lived at home during college. Yes, that sucked, but on the other hand, I got to go to Columbia. I probably should have taken some time between college and law school, but I did not, graduating from Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville in 1982. You might think Nashville was a long way for a New York City kid to go, and you would be right. But that living at home for college thing noted above… let’s just say I needed a new experience and they made me a great offer.

I liked some things about Nashville, but was ready to go back to the City when I finished. I did not love law school, but I did not hate it either, and I did get accepted to the Law Review, and enjoyed that. And I made one great friend - Jay Tobin in Dallas, TX - who had a terrific legal practice life (mostly as in-house counsel), from which he had the eminent sense to retire well before I have from this.

I started my law practice at Patterson, Belknap, Webb, & Tyler, which was a great firm to start at, and it still exists in a similar form and about the same size (200 lawyers). Perhaps the greatest thing about it - to a young lawyer - was that its offices were at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, one of the great office buildings in all of New York. Late one night, I remember getting on the night elevator with Eddie Murphy (SNL is broadcast from 30 Rock). While it remains as one of the few firms of that size that has not merged into another firm (or firms) in the intervening years, it did move its offices over to 6th Avenue, which is unfortunate. Nothing beats 30 Rock.

After a few years in New York, I moved to the US Dept. of Justice as a Trial Attorney in the Environmental Enforcement Section. Before I started in D.C., I spent the summer teaching at Phillips Andover in their Summer Session, where I had discovered my love of teaching during the summers while I was still in College. When I got to DOJ, as part of the Superfund hires, I discovered that we were effectively “partners without associates” - that is, we had all the responsibility but no help, and a huge docket of roughly 30 cases each. Actually, we had a little help: .5 of a paralegal - provided that person was not busy on another case. After three + years there, I needed a change, and I went in-house at Price Waterhouse (yes, the accounting firm), which was building a unit of consultants and lawyers to law firms which were facing increasing automation needs at the time. I did some of the earliest AI in Law work in those years - they were called “expert systems” then. That was very interesting and engaging work, but by then, I had married a woman from Denver, and we were considering moving out there to be near her parents. In 1990, we did that.

She was a lawyer in a giant law firm’s D.C. office and very unhappy there. I thought it might help her to be home and near her parents. We both got jobs at Denver law firms - at the Rothgerber firm for me (now merged and re-merged into several others). I did more commercial litigation there.

That marriage, sadly, fell apart, and I considered moving back to the east coast, but then met and fell in love with my wife of (now) almost 31 years, who has deep family ties in Colorado and New Mexico. I co-founded an internet startup and did its legal work, sold it, and joined a friend to build a small litigation firm with two partners and three associates. Some of our most interesting work there was representing the Northern Arapahoe tribe in Wyoming in a large and complex case against the federal government that had been pending for 22 years.

About this time, my wife - who sometimes jokingly refers to herself as “Wife 2.0” - and I looked at each other and realized that we were both working very hard, and that well… we had a 6 year-old and a 1 year-old at home. Being away for weeks of depositions in D.C. was not working great for either me, the two of us, or our children.

When I was four, my Dad left home and my parents divorced a year or two later. Custody arrangements were not what they are today, and I only got to see my father once a week for half a day, and for a two week stretch in the summer. Yes, that caused all sorts of problems. Let’s just say therapy is a good thing, and everyone has times in their lives when they need the helpful perspective of an independent third-party professional. I had work to do, and I did that work.

With my two daughters, I realized that the thing I most wanted not to do was continue that cycle. So my goal became finding a job that would allow me to be present for my children’s growing up, but that could still offer a deep intellectual challenge in the law.

I cannot prove this, but I might be the longest running currently working “legal writing” teacher in the country. If I am not, it is a pretty short list of folks who have done this for 42 years. (Admittedly, in my case, with two big breaks while I was practicing law).

Because the first time I taught Legal Writing was in the 1984-85 academic year at Cardozo Law in New York. They were starting a writing program and were looking for adjuncts. They hired me, but only - I think - because I had a pulse. My recollection is they gave me a class list and not much else. My class was on Monday at 8:00 a.m., so I spent Sundays working up a lesson plan and grading papers. After teaching on Monday mornings, I went to work in Big Law for the rest of the week. My students from that era are retiring themselves right about now. I hope they have long ago forgiven me for the many mistakes I am sure I made then. But I loved the experience, and I was hooked on the joy of seeing student light bulbs come on.

With that prior experience, when I moved to Denver five years later, I looked at both Colorado schools to see if either had a similar course that that I could teach as an adjunct to my practice life. Denver had started the Lawyering Process (LP) program the previous year, and when I applied and indicated that I had taught the course before, well… they picked me to join a group of other similarly willing lawyers in the Denver area. That was in 1991, so I have been associated with DU’s program for almost 35 years (which is crazy). I taught in that program as an adjunct for six years, until my practice life became too complicated to keep it going. I used to say I was doing the adjunct gig at DU for “beer money” - because the compensation worked out to around a six-pack per week. But that was just a misdirection joke. I had become even more hooked on teaching students than I had been in New York.

In 2000, while I was away, DU Law did a good thing, and professionalized the LP program, hiring full-time faculty members to teach the course. In 2003, while I was looking for a job that would not take me away from my family so much, someone brought me the listing and said: “Didn’t you used to teach this course there?” I am pretty sure I was the only person who applied who had six years of student evaluations in the prior version of the course.

I have now taught full-time in the LP program for 23 years. So, that adds up to 30 years teaching the course, across 43 years of my professional life. While I loved my practice years, the academic life has offered me many opportunities I would not have otherwise had, and opened up and enriched my life in significant ways.

How about some numbers? Over my teaching career, I have taught LP 28 full years, and two partial years (one semester) during sabbaticals. In addition, I have taught a course of my own design called Discovery Practicum 17 semesters, as well as 11 other classes, including Administrative Law (once). All of those additional courses were on top of my regular teaching load. By my count, the full year course of LP I am currently teaching is my 58th class. Four of those were fully online, and 8 of them were hybrid in some form.

Over those years, I have had 1,057 total students in my classes. I often think they taught me more than I ever taught them. Whether that is true or not, they have always been the heart of this work for me - they are, after all, why I got hooked on teaching in the first place. Getting to know them and making a difference in their lives (so they say) has been the greatest honor and privilege of my life. Many of my forty-five teaching assistants over those years have literally become a part of my life. I treasure all my students, but particularly my TAs. I could not have delivered what we delivered each year without their help and support. I am deeply in their debt.

I have published four books, something I never expected to do when I was practicing law. Two of those were hybrid textbooks - one for LP and the other for the Discovery Law course I created. The other two books analyze the role that technology has had - and will continue to have - on the legal education enterprise. Over that time, I also published 22 articles, and have over 8,000 downloads of those articles from SSRN and Digital Commons (combined). One of those articles compiles everything I learned over my years teaching the course.

I was active in the Legal Writing Institute for many years, serving on several committees and co-chairing two conferences, and I served a four-year term on its elected Board. I also served on numerous committees of the Associate of Legal Writing Directors.

In total, I hosted or co-chaired 11 national conferences, including the first Law School Assessment conference (in 2011) and the first national conference focused on best practices for online learning in law school - five months before the pandemic hit. I also co-created (with my good and valued friend Cliff Zimmerman at Northwestern) and hosted at DU the first law school Symposium (with published papers) on the role of the Hidden Curriculum in legal education. For all of those conferences, I had the privilege of working with some of the greatest people, colleagues, and friends - all of whom I have been lucky enough to know and to work with over a professional life. They were a lot of work, but they were also a blast.

The University of Denver gave me its Distinguished Teaching award in 2012, and the law school’s Alumni Association honored me with the Robert B. Yegge Excellence in Teaching award in 2025. The latter award committee produced this wonderful short video that captures well my orientation to the work. To have these formal recognitions has meant a great deal to me. They are honors I will always treasure.

Perhaps the most unexpected thing the academic life has offered me has been international travel to meet and work with colleagues with similar issues and challenges in their work. I have presented at academic conferences in Montreal, London, and Prague. I have been an invited speaker at conferences in Beijing, St. Petersburg, Sydney, Tokyo, and Moscow. These experiences have broadened my life in profound ways that will always be a part of me. To meet a colleague who teaches law on the other side of the world and who has read your work and made changes to their teaching methods because of it? Well, let’s just say I never expected to do anything like that in law practice. Ever.

So why, after all this fun, would I leave? Primarily for three reasons.

First, our financial planner says I can. My wife retired two years ago, and we have been fine (so far). He says we will be fine from here and I trust him. It is terrifying to do this now, when the world seems on fire, but again, he assures me it will be ok. I realize and acknowledge that not everyone has this option. I am grateful that I do. So, it is time for this reason.

Second, without singling anyone out, I have over the years given a side-eye to some of our colleagues who can’t let go, and who continue to collect a large salary and yet contribute not as much. It is hard to leave the confines of the ivory tower - I get it - but of greater concern to me is that doing so holds back younger colleagues with great ideas and drive. Bringing them in keeps the organization healthy and senior folks should step aside and make room for them. I decided many years ago I did not want to keep hanging on, but rather I wanted to make room for that new energy. So, it is time for this reason also.

Third, I am bone deep tired. Tired not so much of the work or the students but tired of the micro-aggressions within and across the faculty, of which many seem so blissfully unaware. My former colleague Nantiya Ruan (now a fully tenured professor at a higher ranked school with a higher ranked legal writing program) has written about this fully. It just wears you down, and this might be a personal failing of some sort, but I have reached my limit. I might have lasted longer if not for the accumulated years of these petty frustrations. So, it is time for this reason as well.

But. This is not a complaint post. It is a joyous look in the rear view mirror at an engaging and varied law practice, and also the opportunities I have been given at the University of Denver - and all I have been able to do from this modest perch. I hope it offers inspiration to younger colleagues who might read this. Meeting and working with great students has been a joy - and offered incredibly enriching work that felt like I was giving back to the profession I love. Add in worldwide travel, writing, publishing, making life-long friendships with colleagues far and wide and my cup runneth over. Also, I had these opportunities while, most importantly, being closer to home for my kids’ growing up years.

I am incredibly proud of my two daughters, who have been my greatest gift. They are smart, loving, well-informed citizens of the world who are entering adulthood with an orientation of giving back. I love them more than I can adequately put into words. They amaze me every day. It gives me great joy when they are happy.

I know it is cliché for a man to end such a retrospective with a hat tip to his wife. But none of this would have been possible without her in my life. It was a lucky day for me when we met (on a blind date!) and fell in love. Early on we determined to become - and we have become - a good team. She earned a Masters degree at the law school, which enabled her to work in the Law Department at Allstate Insurance Co. for the final 18 of her 37 years with the company. I have regularly relied on her perspective and advice. I absolutely adore her. She makes me laugh. We support each other and take joy in doing so.

This retrospective turned out to be longer than I intended. But I have wanted to take a snapshot in the rear view mirror as I take this next step. If you have read this far, thank you. I hope it has been fun to see what a career trajectory in law practice and law teaching could look like for you.

Finally, to my students over the years:

• Thank you for joining in the teaching and learning journeys we went on together.

• I know you will continue to do great things, and I am cheering you on.

• I ask your forgiveness for the mistakes I am sure I made along the way.

• Please continue to stay in touch, as many of you have over the years. (I am told that my email address at the University will remain active).

For now, I leave you with this excerpt from a poem by Anne Morrow Lindbergh -

Already I have shed the leaves of youth,

stripped by the wind of time down to the truth

of winter branches. Linear and alone

I stand, a lens for lives beyond my own,

a frame through which another’s fire may glow…

There are a number of reasons why I have made this decision. Perhaps most importantly, I have just had the most difficult six months I can remember, personally. During the semester, I rarely travel so I can stay focused on classes and not risk missing a class (it’s just too disruptive, at least for me). But last fall I had two Covid-delayed memorials I had to attend (one in Spokane the other in Santa Fe) and in between those two my step-mother died, and I traveled to Washington, D.C. for her memorial.

At the end of that, our daughter had a medical issue that - after many consultations with doctors - culminated in major surgery two days before Christmas. (She is going to be fine). While all of this is going on through the fall, my mother-in-law had been failing, was moved to a memory care facility, and then another one, and then Hospice, and then she died last Monday at the age of 90. The matriarch of a large family leaves an immense hole.

Further, as I have mentioned, over the last several years I have been working on a new book, which went to the publisher in mid-September, and throughout the fall - in between everything else - I was putting time into edits and galleys and cover design, etc. for the book. That book published this week, and is now available in print and ebook format. (See below).

It helped, immensely, for me to have this newsletter going while I was getting the book over the finish line, in two significant ways. First, I have developed a deep respect for the exercise of writing a column every week and for those who do it for years on end (including some newsletters I subscribe to - shoutout to Joel Neff here). For me, it helped to keep that channel open between the brain and the fingers, by forcing me to so on a regular schedule. Particularly while I most needed it: while finishing up the book project. Second, I did not really set out to do this, but this newsletter helped me work out and mature some of my thinking on technology in teaching, some of which ended up in the book. Examples of this are the following newsletters: Not all Content Fits in all Containers, The Future is Hybrid, and the impact of Social Media on our Students.

With the book finished, however - and no current plan to do that again any time soon - both of those reasons have been removed. Indeed, this book feels very much like my last word on the subject. I have put everything I know and believe into it. The well is empty right now, and while I know it will refill, it has not done so yet. You - my faithful and kind readers - have been generous with your time in reading my musings about teaching, but I am well aware that I have no monopoly on good ideas around the art we share. I openly invite the readership to send me columns you would like to see here. I will gladly publish them.

So I have decided to take a time out. I am not shutting down the newsletter, and the archive will remain right where it is. (I just renewed the domain name yesterday).

Thanks so much for being a faithful reader. One of the best things I discovered in starting this newsletter has been meeting and getting to know many of you, and having some of these musings start new and even more interesting conversations among us. I am deeply grateful.

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Letters of Recommendation

I hope you will forgive me this, but my recommendation this week is my new book just out from Carolina Academic Press: The Way Forward for Legal Education. I have written about it so much here, it seems right to give you a link for more information and an excerpt should it interest. I have tried to make this newsletter more generally applicable than the area in which I teach, and this book focuses very much on that area, so it may be of limited interest to many of you. But - as noted above - it did in some ways come from here, so it seems right to end with it here.

Q of the Week

The Q of the Week this week is a Quote from the singer-songwriter Zac Brown:

I long for the time before I knew that the world was unkind.

Share The Chalkboard Life

There is a feeling of accomplishment. In almost every case, our students moved from point A to point B. Perhaps not perfectly, but they all reached a level of understanding and achievement of the learning goals we set out for them at the beginning of the semester. You can see this in their work product, but also in the smiles on their faces. Smiles that come from being glad to be finished with the work you gave them, but also their own feeling of accomplishment. It is always a good sign when your students are smiling on the last day of the semester.

Again this year, I feel this sense of accomplishment. Students once again had smiles of accomplishment on the last day of class. For me, this fall was particularly difficult, because of the conference in September, and I was finishing the book, but mostly because of a rash of personal matters, with three Covid-delayed memorials of family members, each an airplane ride away. If I learned anything this fall, it was that I can do such a thing - be away several weekends in a row - and still keep things going in the classroom. But I also learned it came at a price, which reminded me of this excerpt from last year:

There is a feeling of exhaustion. I don’t know about you, but at the end of the semester I am completely out of gas. Just tapped. I remember when I switched from practicing law to teaching it, I was kind of surprised that I was so exhausted at the end of the semester. But then I realized that this is as it should be. If I was going to leave the profession to give back to students, I was going to have to bring my “A” game every day to that enterprise. So I should be out of gas at the end of the semester. As I get older, it seems like this feeling is even more pronounced.

This year, after the book, conference, and all that travel, I had a bout of vertigo, and had to have my TAs take a class for me (which I almost never do).

On a more encouraging note, I wrote this last year:

There is a feeling of time opening up. That is, instead of being hemmed in by the class schedule, there is time to engage with colleagues, explore new topics of interest, and the luxury of extended time to read.

I will be attending our annual conference this year - which will be in-person for the first time in three years - to learn some new things, to reconnect with friends and colleagues, and to flog the book, which will “launch” at the conference. (If you would like to know more about that, here is a page on my publisher’s website with an excerpt from the book).

Last year I also noted that grading is inevitably a part of this time of year:

There is the feeling of the mountain of grading casting a shadow over each day of the break period, until it is finished. This is obviously not the best part of the break between semesters, but it is a reality. The earliest you can get that finished, the better, because those days of break after being finished with grading are closer to being truly “clear.” But it also must be accepted that some years we are simply too exhausted to get to grading right away.

I am once again trying to find time for grading while the family events start to ramp up as we approach Christmas. It is an annual struggle.

There is a feeling of needing to recharge. Last year, I wrote one of these letters with suggestions about ways in which teachers can, and should, recharge before the new school year begins. This is perhaps even more important to do intentionally during the shorter breaks that we have at this time of year.

Sometimes, the best thing I can do is sit on the couch and read a book. There is something that recharges me about spending the better part of a day doing only that. So far, I have not been able to do so. But the book I recommend below is calling me to the couch…

What do you do to recharge after the fall semester?

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Letters of Recommendation

This week - in the evenings - I have been reading a fascinating book by Tom Lewis about the history of the construction of the interstate highway system in the United States. It is called Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life. Having driven on these highways for much of my life, I realize I had - as most of us do - taken them for granted. Assumed, in a way, that they were always there (although I knew better). This is the story of how they were built, and most importantly, their impact on the country - the good and the bad.

A quick reminder: all books I recommend here are available at a discount in The Chalkboard Life’s Bookshop, which you can visit here!

Visit the TCL Bookshop

Q of the Week

The Q of the Week this week is a Quote from the great and powerful writer James Baldwin:

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

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As a start, it has to be acknowledged that student evaluations are flawed.  Most particularly, they often disadvantage teachers of color and women.  There are those who feel that given this fact, they are useless and untrustworthy, and can (and have been) misused to the detriment of many of our colleagues.  These are all good arguments, and I do not discount them.  An administrator or review committee should be well versed on these limitations and trained to recognize where they appear and make proper and generous adjustments for them in their reviews. Yes, that is extra work, but it is not a good faith review without doing it.

It also has to be said that student evaluations can have a pernicious effect on learning.  That is, some teachers adjust what they are doing in the classroom because they are afraid of bad student evaluations.  Put another way, they do not push students into that uncomfortable place where deep learning often happens, and they avoid doing this because they perceive that students will rebel by hitting hard in the student evaluation at the end of the semester.  Of course, good and dedicated teachers do not do this.  But it takes some confidence and assurance that what you are doing (syllabus, learning outcomes, assignments, grading) are the right things to do.

A related concern is that if students scare the teacher into lightening up their workload, over time it dumbs down the entire enterprise and becomes a “customer focused” process that many teachers decry.

These flaws in student evaluations argue pretty strongly in favor of their abolishment.

First, students have a right to have some anonymous avenue for raising legitimate concerns about what is happening in the classroom.  Second, not all student evaluations are tainted by poor motives, or merely offered out of vengeance for being challenged in the course.  Third, if we do not allow student evaluations, some teachers could run amok with no accountability for what is happening in the classroom. 

I had a colleague some years ago who mentioned that she never read her own student evaluations.  As painful as they can sometimes be to read, I think that is a mistake.

When a colleague or mentee asks me to read their student evaluations and provide feedback, I gladly do so.  It is very common to focus on the negative comments and at least be upset, and at worst lose motivation for the work. But inevitably there are good ideas and generous comments in amongst the negative ones, so it is important to take the time to separate the wheat from the chaff.

When I am asked to review a colleague’s evaluations, I use a system I devised to review my own years ago, when I too was bummed out by – and over focused on – the negative.  It is simple, really: I use three color highlighters to classify the student comments into these three categories:  Green is for positive comments, Yellow is for comments that might have a grain of truth and constructive suggestion for improvement, and Orange is for un-constructive, mean, or vindictive comments.

Once that highlighting is done, it becomes immediately apparent that there were many nice and supportive comments (the green ones).  And it makes it easier to focus less – or even ignore – the un-constructive comments. 

Perhaps the most useful thing about this process is to spend time considering the constructive suggestions for improvement, which can lead to a healthy consideration focused on improvement.  If in this sort of review of a set of evaluations a teacher can find one thing to fix or adjust in the coming semester to what they are doing, that’s probably enough.  Over a decade of doing this, improvements add up, and in nearly all cases, evaluations will improve.

After going through this review, it is good to put them aside, and rededicate oneself to doing what you believe is best for your students.  Work on the one take-away and keep moving.  If you really feel awful, remember to do two things.  Read the green comments in your evals and read your thank you note file.  You keep those too, right?

Let us know what you do with your student evaluations!

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Letters of Recommendation

On the subject of student evaluations and how to use them constructively is a book by Professor Ronald A. Berk, formerly Associate Dean for Teaching at Johns Hopkins University: Top 10 Flashpoints in Student Ratings and the Evaluation of Teaching: What Faculty and Administrators Must Know to Protect Themselves in Employment Decisions.

Q of the Week

The Q of the Week this week is a Quote about the current situation at Twitter from user XanIndego on Mastodon:

I do not like that site of birds
I do not like its awful words

I do not like what it became
I do not like its cult of shame

I do not like intrusive ads
I do not like the vapid fads

I do not like the clout it’s given
I do not like its algorithm

But I shall miss that weird bird town
I do not like it burning down

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About 30 years ago, as the Internet was expanding, I remember having an idea, one I have thought of many times since then. It went like this. I realized that as I read the paper each morning, I “edited” it on the fly. And that everybody else did so as well. Because, unless you have all the time in the world, you can’t read it all, every day. And a general-interest newspaper doesn’t really expect you to, either. Instead, you skim parts, and read other parts closely. For some, they might read the opinion pages, and the sports pages, and that’s it. For others, they would read the international news closely, and skip the sports pages (except for baseball season). You get the idea. (How do you read your daily paper?)

It hit me one day that it should be possible to configure your newspaper the way you read it, and have that printed automatically on your home printer (rather than centrally printed and delivered by burning fossil fuels). Looking back since then - as the internet has explosively grown - I have realized over and over what a terrible idea this was. Because as soon as we cut off certain types of news from getting to our doorstep, we create an echo chamber that we live in, and over time, our views start to narrow.

As an educator, of course our job is to broaden our students’ minds, not narrow them. So we expose them to myriad sources of information, and encourage them to read it all and build their skills of discernment.

In social media, what we do is “edit” what we see, just like my “customized newspaper” idea, only worse. Worse, because the amount of news is much greater, and the tools by which to filter it are much more powerful than what I originally envisioned. And so, whether the tool is Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or any other social media platform, we create our own “echo chambers” and live in them. And even worse than that, the algorithms run by these systems - tracking everything you look at - recommends more of the same. And when the “algo” shows you something you don’t like, you can block it, thus perpetuating the echo chamber even more. This cannot be healthy for us, or for our students. It becomes addictive entertainment.

There is a reason why we use these systems: they are absolutely amazing. We connect with family members around the world, see their pictures and their messages, easily forward them to others… we meet people in our fields of interest (there is a community for every hobby, every interest) whom we would otherwise never meet… we hear about things we never would have heard of or seen. Just last week, I saw a clip of a baby giraffe standing up for the first time soon after being born! When was I going to see that in my lifetime?

My biggest objection to social media is that it traffics in what I call “cotton candy clever broadcast.” As a colleague once said to me:

Over the nearly 14 years I have had an account on Twitter, it has seemed to me mostly stuck on transmit. Clever, yes, quite often. But also about as nutritional as cotton candy. Even threads and replies seem to me mostly like ping pong more than a real conversation. But there remains value - as long as it is a safe space for the exchange of ideas. And we must know and be sensitive to the fact that many members of marginalized communities do not feel safe on these platforms. They are often viciously attacked, mocked, and what passes for discourse becomes and incites hateful behavior. Massive staffs at these companies must be dedicated to rooting out such behavior, exposing it, and controlling it. Or the place just becomes a cesspool for those who think the same way on the same 5 topics.

I will not repeat here the incomprehensible actions of the current owner of Twitter since I wrote about his leadership of the company two weeks ago. I am sure you have seen or heard it all. But as I said then, we may not deserve, or be able to have, a “town square” in which everyone feels safe and we keep the good parts and get rid of the bad parts. We may not be able to have such a thing. But we should. And maybe we can.

What “the Sink man” - as I have come to refer to him - has done is show us all that we need to be more in control of these systems, and use them for our benefit, not the benefit of billionaire owners. And, as many of us have discovered in the last week, there are alternatives.

Mastodon is a distributed social media “fediverse” that runs on smaller servers where those of common interest gather. They are small(er) groups, but they are connected to the whole. Something you post can be limited to your group, and things you read as well, but you can also connect to the full fediverse and read and contribute to what is going on there. It is open-source software, as well as distributed and run by volunteers on each server “instance,” so there are no advertisements.

The history of technology is littered with sites or software that worked well for a while, and then they faltered and were overtaken. Many of these were so huge and successful no one could imagine they would ever fail. And yet fail they did, and then something new came along to take its place.

I am starting to think that “Sink Man” did us all a favor. And the direction we need to go in is to spread out, connect as needed, and police our own sites ourselves. Mastodon might be showing us the way.

Please put your (new?) social media handle in the comments - and if you are moving to Mastodon, or Post, or Hive - or another one - please let everyone know.

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Letters of Recommendation

My father left home when I was four, and being the only male left in the family (I had two sisters, one older, one younger), as soon as I could wield a knife, I was expected to carve the turkey at Thanksgiving. My mother used to say to me: “If you know how to carve and are single, you will always be invited to dinner parties.” (Sheesh, is that a throwback to the 1950s or what??)

Anyway, I did learn how to carve a turkey, and do not mind doing it. But shall we all admit? It’s a pain. Well, one of my brilliant daughters decided we should cook the turkey differently this year - on a wire rack, having been dismembered raw first and dry-brined overnight. It was fantastic. And an absolute breeze to carve for the table. Here is the recipe for the dry brine, and a video explaining how to deconstruct the turkey and cook it. Maybe save for next year?

Q of the Week

The Q of the Week this week is a Quote from Maria Popova, who writes a brilliant weekly newsletter called The Marginalian:

Few things are more seductive to us than a ready opinion, and we brandish few things more flagrantly as we move through the world, slicing through its fundamental uncertainty with our insecure certitudes.

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When we switched to online learning in the early days of the pandemic, there was an assumption that this would be inferior, and that students would not do well. And there does seem to be some emerging data of grade school students falling behind during the pandemic, particularly in math. But to make that a broad generalization seems also premature. Some administrators find themselves surprised that many students liked the flexibility it offered them, and teachers did as well.

At the graduate level - where I work - the emerging story is so far encouraging - at least from the student perspective. And so today I would like to share with you the results of two recent surveys of students about their experiences in online learning environments in law school.

The first one came out this summer, and was sponsored by the American Bar Association, which is the regulating body for law schools. This survey was conducted in February of 2022, and had 1,394 third-year students who replied, from 60 law schools. There were three question responses of particular interest.

The first question was: If a return to in-person learning was permitted by your law school for the current academic year, did you choose to enroll in any distance education courses this academic year? 57.5% said yes. The second was: If you had a choice to take a course in person or through Zoom or other web broadcast where all students are remote, which format would you prefer? 52.3% chose the online option. The third question was: Do you want the ability to earn more distance education course credit than your law school currently allows? 68.7% said yes.

Now, these are not overwhelming responses, that is true. But in the context of so many who were so sure that this was going to be awful, and years of skepticism about the quality of online learning… Well, it says at least two things, I think.

First, it says that - at least at these 60 schools - the teachers were able to pivot and provide a decent educational product that worked to achieve the learning outcomes for the courses they were taking. Second, it says that - at least for the majority of these 1,394 students - they thought it worked, and want to learn more in that format.

The second survey that came out - just last month - is a highly regarded survey instrument that has been operating in law schools for 20 years. It is run out of the University of Indiana, and is called the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE). This survey was of 13,000 students at 70 different law schools. Of those, 50% took at least one course taught mostly or entirely online. 75% of those students were “comfortable with nearly all features of online education, from interacting with faculty and classmates to taking exams.” Even more striking was that almost 90% of respondents - whether they were learning in-person or online - agreed they were learning to think critically and analytically. 76% of students said they enjoyed “good” or even “excellent” online courses.

One question this survey asks every year is whether the student would attend law school again if given the choice to start over, and whether they would attend the *same* law school. What was particularly interesting was that *more* students gave positive responses to those questions who had attended mostly online, as opposed to those who attended in-person. 88% vs. 81%.

What I think these surveys are telling us is that, done well, online learning environments can be effective, and that students can learn in them, and know they have learned effectively in them. And given the flexibility (and other benefits) it offers, they like it. And let’s not forget this was only after 18 months or two years! We’re just getting started, and there is much yet to learn about how to do this well.

I find this all very encouraging. What do you think? Do you feel like there would be similar results where you teach?

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Letters of Recommendation

Some months ago, I recommended a biography of the 18th Century musician Johann Sebastian Bach. That one was written by the conductor John Eliot Gardiner, and at 670 pages, probably enough on the subject. And yet, here I am recommending another biography of Bach, this one by Harvard University Professor Christoph Wolff, Bach: The Learned Musician. This one is only 600 pages! I cannot quite say why I have found both of these books fascinating. Perhaps because we now realize what an incredible musical genius Bach was, and yet the bureaucrats who bossed him around did not. And the sheer immensity of his output. For two years, he wrote, rehearsed a group of musicians and choristers, and lead the performance of a new Cantata he wrote every week. For two years! And in the years before and after achieving that feat, he wrote the St. John Passion and the St. Matthew Passion. And The Art of Fugue, The Well Tempered Clavier, the Brandenburg Concertos, the Cello Suites, and so much more. And while doing all of that, he was a sought after organ consultant, had many students, and tuned and maintained his own harpsichords. Oh yeah, and he also had 20 children.

Q of the Week

The Q of the Week this week is a Quote from the novelist Andrea Barrett:

I've never known a writer who didn't feel ill at ease in the world. ... We all feel unhoused in some sense. That's part of why we write. We feel we don't fit in, that this world is not our world, that though we may move in it, we're not of it. ... You don't need to write a novel if you feel at home in the world.

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I will not reiterate the news - you have probably seen it all. But it does seem as though Elon Musk decided to purchase Twitter on a whim, did not do sufficient due diligence, then tried to back out of the deal all summer, and when he realized he would lose in court, he finally went through with the deal. Since then he has fired half the company, then tried to hire some of them back, tried to launch an $8 check mark feature threatening to fire the team if they could not finish it by an arbitrary deadline, then they did, and he pulled the feature two days later because it was obviously ridiculous and poorly thought through.

During the firing spree, he fired the people who are responsible for compliance with an FTC negotiated decree whereby Twitter agreed to implement certain community safety guardrails and regularly report to the FTC showing their compliance with the decree. The day before such a report was due. The FTC is not amused.

Advertisers, who provide 90% of Twitter’s revenue, were already concerned about Musk’s spouting off about free speech and bringing back Tweeps who had been banned (for pretty good reasons). When he took over and acted as irrationally as he has been… many of Twitter’s major advertisers have ah… “paused” their advertising. Musk announced to his employees on Wednesday that Twitter was losing $4M per day, and that bankruptcy was a real possibility.

So. If Twitter is a cesspool, having Musk buy it and flush $44B down the drain would be a net good, right? Competitors will try to offer alternatives. There’s already one - it is called Mastodon. Others will spring up.

But what if Twitter really does provide what has become a real and important service? The “public square” as Musk - and many others - have called it. Perhaps it has become a Utility we all need to connect to, like the power company, under that view. If you have heard the whiff of panic from journalists about the possible demise of Twitter… it is because it has become an indispensable research and contact development tool for them.

For students, it is also a great research tool. It connects them to each other in important ways. And to important parts of their lives.

The big question is: “Can we have a powerful tool such as Twitter - the Public Square online - and maintain appropriate guardrails (and still be profitable)?”

Up to this point, Twitter has had only one profitable year (2019). And it struggled mightily to maintain guardrails of behavior. There is a mountain of evidence that it has contributed to the coarsening of American discourse, that it allowed an avenue for Russian interference in American elections, etc. Abuse is rampant on the site, and people of color and those with disabilities - they need more abuse and racism never, and yet it happens every day, still. So the track record is awful. The answer to that question would be - so far, no. We can’t have something like Twitter in a way that works for everyone.

Maybe the best thing IS for Musk to come in, blow it up, send $44B down the drain, and for us to try again with another service. Or maybe in shaking everything up, he CAN make it profitable, and preserve the guardrails. Although it seems like - through many of his tweets and actions since he purchased it - he does not see the need for that part much at all.

Mr. Big Ideas might have run out of them. They involve nuance, and this guy doesn’t seem much interested in nuance.

Did you know the first time he walked into Twitter HQ after purchasing the company, he was carrying a bathroom sink, so he could tweet: “let that sink in?” I can’t make this stuff up:

The only problem I see with that behavior - other than it being childish and ridiculous - is this: sinks have drains.

What do you think? Can Twitter be saved?

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Letters of Recommendation

On the subject of social media and its manipulative effects on us, I can recommend Max Fisher’s book on social media, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World.

Q of the Week

The Q of the Week this week is a Quote from Hamish McKenzie, Co-Founder of Substack, the platform through which I draft and send this newsletter to you every week:

While we may be convincing ourselves that we’re participating in discourse in the public square, we’re actually in a cage, making a spectacle of ourselves for little more than weak dopamine hits and a few pretend friends. The real prize goes to Twitter itself. Twitter needs your mind so it can satisfy its real customers: advertisers.

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I am doing this for two reasons. First, last week’s post, entitled Burn Out, was perhaps more personal than I might have let on. Second, I am absolutely buried with grading this week. So instead of a new post, I offer a reprise of this newsletter since it began 94 weeks ago.

My most popular newsletter, in terms of reads, forwards, and comments has been:

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Why Newsletters?

This week, I am going to depart from my usual menu of musings on teaching and technology. What I want to share with you is some news from the growing newsletter community. You might think - are you serious? There is nothing new about newsletters. Actually… it turns out there is…

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4 years ago · 8 likes · 3 comments · David Thomson

I think that is interesting, particularly in light of the upset going on over at Twitter, after Elon Musk completed his purchase of the company. I am working on a longer post about Twitter, but it is not quite ready. And the situation is in flux, to say the least. Stay tuned!

My second most popular newsletter was:

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The Invisible 10%

This is a difficult subject to write about, because sometimes I think I’m crazy. I think this is because most people can’t see it, and so when I speak of it to them, they look at me strangely. They think it is “woo woo” or something, and perhaps it is. Indeed, I am not even sure how to write about it, but I have found with this newsletter that the we…

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5 years ago · 5 likes · 4 comments · David Thomson

In this post I describe - or try to - the extra effort that truly dedicated teachers put in to their work. Day in, and day out. When I wrote it, I was pretty sure I was nuts, but I am thrilled that it struck a nerve for many of you.

In third place is a post written from some notes taken during a conversation several years ago with my friend and colleague Fred Cheever.

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A Conversation

This column was written with Frederico (Fred) Cheever, who died in 2017. In a moment, I will tell you how that could be, but first I would like to tell you about my friend. Fred was a dedicated environmental lawyer and teacher, who died too young doing something he loved: river rafting on the Green River in Northwest Colorado with his family. It was a …

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4 years ago · 5 likes · 5 comments · David Thomson

I have dedicated my new book to Fred (and my wonderful wife Kathy) and some of this I used in the dedication in the book.

Next up is a newsletter about the service orientation that teachers have (and, I argue, must have):

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The Attitude of Service

In her book entitled Cultivating Teacher Renewal, Barbara Larrivee wrote that “teaching is emotional labor.” This is certainly true. And I would add that such emotional labor requires an attitude of service. Because at its best, teaching of all kinds is a service profession over all else. But not everyone approaches the task from this perspective. For …

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4 years ago · 5 likes · David Thomson

In the new book, I take this idea a bit further: that in many professional (graduate) schools, teachers should imbue their students with an attitude of service as well.

Another weekly missive that seemed to strike a chord with many readers was this one:

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Hybrid Textbooks

On this subject, I have felt for at least a decade that I am screaming into the void. It seems so obvious to me, but we continue to make little progress. So therefore it is not obvious to anyone else, and I am just an outlier. In the face of this reality, I am going to mount this soapbox again, in the (probably) vain hope that it might make a differe…

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4 years ago · 5 likes · 5 comments · David Thomson

This newsletter was also followed by a second post on the same subject, Hybrid Textbooks II, and a Guest Post from Joel Neff entitled Beyond Hybrid Textbooks.

So, there you have it. The most “popular” posts over the last 1.5 years of weekly writing. They run the gamut of topics I try to cover here - from dedication to teaching, to teaching with technology, to the impact of social media on our students.

Thanks for reading!

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Letters of Recommendation

I am currently enjoying The Bookseller of Florence, written by Ross King (who also wrote the excellent Brunelleschi’s Dome). It sheds light on the obscure book hunters of 15th century Florence who found, reprinted, and thus revived many ancient Greek and Roman texts which otherwise might have been lost to history. Read together with The Swerve, by Steven Greenblatt.

Q of the Week

The Q of the Week this week is a Quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year and this time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

A real risk for teachers who care - in the best of circumstances - is burn out, and data suggests that it is worse today than perhaps it ever has been in the modern era of education. A Gallup poll last February indicated that teachers suffered from burnout more than any other job, with 44% of K-12 teachers saying they “always” or “very often” feel burned out. 35% of college teachers felt the same. These numbers have nearly doubled in the last two years.

But what is “burn out,” how do you know you are at that stage, what causes it, and what can you do about it?

I am not an expert in this subject, and it is personal for each of us. But I think it is fair to say that all teachers have - at one point or another - had feelings of being “burned out.” It means we’re out of gas, or each day there is little left in the tank. To use a battery analogy, over time, our batteries do not get sufficiently recharged on evenings and weekends to make it through the day or the week without feeling completely discharged.

Another symptom is illness. Sometimes we push ourselves to the limits of our physical and mental strength, unawares that we are doing so. Until you end up with a terrible flu, ear infection, or similar health event that lands you in the ER. This is the ultimate wake up call for a teacher.

The causes of burn out among teachers are myriad and different for each of us. But there are some similarities. Overwork. Long days. Too many students. The endlessly giving mentality of a good teacher. Personal issues and challenges. Health issues. Uncaring administrators. Demanding parents. Students who have disengaged.

Most often, it is a mashup of too many of these at the same time. It just happens. It isn’t anything you did.

What to do about it is tougher. Often you will have colleagues who will help take a day or two - you just have to admit you need help and ask for it. But often the only thing you can do is grit your teeth until the end of the semester or school year. And so your best and hang on.

While you are doing that, it might help to think of ways you might be able to reorder the rest of your life. The reality is that a good teacher is making sacrifices about what they can do during the week - and on weekends - other than their job. They have to conserve their energies during the weekends to have enough left to get through the week. For some, going to an all day tailgate and football game is energizing. For most, while fun, it is exhausting. If you are the latter, you have to say no to some of those things so you can be rested and maintain a quiet mindset so that when Monday comes, you can pour it out in class and not be burned out at the end of the day.

I suspect teacher burn out is, generally speaking, not an issue that concerns administrators much. It is hard for them, for sure, to know where the line is with their teachers. They want to maximize the human resource, but they don’t really know where that maximum is, and often push past it by assigning too many students, or requiring too many forms, or faculty meetings, or committee service, or all four. A good administrator is constantly in touch with their teachers about this, and being careful not to require too much, so as to preserve the quality of the educational enterprise as a whole.

Have you had periods of burn out in your teaching? What have you done to address it, and get back on track?

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Letters of Recommendation

Another great article in The New Yorker magazine this week, this one on the Nobel Prize winning musician, poet, and composer, Bob Dylan. If you are a Dylan fan, you’ll enjoy it. And even if you’re not.

Q of the Week

The Q of the Week this week is a Quote from the American writer Norman Rush:

The main effort of arranging your life should be to progressively reduce the amount of time required to decently maintain yourself so that you can have all the time you want for reading.

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I think perhaps the analogy for me is less literal and more about those magical moments when the whole group is making music together. That is what I am hoping for every year - that at some point each class of students will come together not as individual students merely focused on their individual grade, but rather enjoying learning together, helping each other, and as Parker Palmer calls it, every one contributing to a “community of truth.”

The novelist Jesse Ball in his book Notes on My Dunce Cap, puts it this way: 

You should give as much as you can, keeping in mind that you will give and be disdained and misunderstood for years on end, perhaps for the entirety of your career.  You will be thought stupid.  You will be understood by the entire class as a whimsical jackass.  But on some days, the tide may turn, and then one is helped, and another is helped.  Depending on the students, it may be possible to create a small and separate cosmos - a joyful laboratory.  Then you need to do very little as a teacher, because everyone is busy learning from each other.

Some of my best classes happen when I give students a project to work on with each other and I get out of the way. I will sit off to the side, and invite them to come ask me questions if they need to. Sometimes, I will walk around the room because I have found that when I am in near proximity, I am more likely to get a question. Sometimes I will observe a group working together, but not chime in at all.

Doing this is sometimes referred to as serving as the “guide on the side” as opposed to being the “sage on the stage.” Most teaching, for centuries, was in the form of the sage on the stage. And of course there remains a role for simply teaching students something you know and understand - learning by transmittal as it is known. Where the assumption is that the student is an empty vessel into which we pour knowledge. But I find more and more that I should be working on setting up work plans for students to do in a portion of class time, so the entire class is not me plodding through a powerpoint, listening to the sound of my own voice.

On many of these days, when I am sitting off to the side and my students are working together, actively learning, that sounds like music to me. Like a symphony with no set score - admittedly played by non-experts - which in concept sounds awful. But to me it is the best teaching music there is, and each time I wonder why I don’t do it more often in my classes.

Do you? Please comment and describe your classes of this kind.

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Letters of Recommendation

This week I can recommend a terrific article on the subject of teaching in more of a “Guide on the Side” way: Alison King, From Sage on the Stage to Guide on the Side, 41 College Teaching 30 (Winter 1993).

Q of the Week

The Q of the Week this week is a Quote from the American writer Jodi Picoult:

The fact that you worry about being a good teacher means that already are one.

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David’s piece last Saturday, comparing teaching to orchestral conducting, got me thinking.  I asked him to let me respond this week, not to challenge or correct anything he said, but to give a different perspective on what conductors do.

For context, I should explain that before becoming a lawyer and a law professor, I trained and worked as a conductor, and also sat through many, many orchestra rehearsals – some good, many not – as a violin and viola player.  Based on my experience,  I can tell you that conducting isn’t necessarily what you might think it is.

David titled his post last week “Traffic Cop,” and that’s a fair description of what conductors do in concert, although unlike drivers the musicians know (for the most part) when they’re supposed to go and when they’re supposed to stop.  Conductors will cue the musicians from time to time – sometimes with the gestures you can see but much more often with looks that you can’t – but that is really only an acknowledgement by conductor and musician that we both know what’s going to happen next.  This is, of course, an over-simplification of the conductor’s role in concert, but there is also some truth to it.

In fact, a conductor is arguably significantly less powerful than a traffic cop.  For all the popular perception of the conductor as an all-powerful, magical, being who wills the performance into being by force of thought and the gesturing of a wand, the reality is that the conductor has no power except that bestowed by convention and the professionalism of the musicians.  If they don’t want to follow what the conductor is showing them – and that happens more than you might think – they will ignore what they see from the podium and play the way they want to.  There are things a conductor can do to try to regain control, but when the only thing you have is a little white stick that doesn’t make any noise, it can be difficult.  And while conductors of the past had the absolute power to hire and fire orchestral musicians, that power is (mercifully) no longer in the conductor’s hands.

So what do conductors do and why do they exist?  There are orchestras – the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra being perhaps the most well-known – that don’t use conductors at all.  Maybe they’re just an anachronism that makes no sense in the contemporary world of orchestral music.  Certainly, some orchestral players would cheerfully agree with that idea, but only in jest.  They would probably (grudgingly) acknowledge that conductors play a vital role in the performance of orchestral music and that they make the entire process more efficient.

That is because what you see in concert of a conductor’s role is like the visible part of an iceberg;  the vast part of their job is done out of the audience’s sight.  First, the conductor must have a strong grounding in music theory and history which is acquired over years of study.  Then the conductor must have spent hours studying and thinking about the pieces on a concert.  This requires not just knowing how the music sounds, although knowing how each part sounds – not just the melodies, but also all the accompanying parts as well – is a crucial part of a conductor’s preparation;  the conductor must also anticipate where problems might occur and plan solutions to those problems and must have a rock-solid understanding of the overall arch of the piece, both formally and thematically.  And then the conductor must know, before the first rehearsal, how to convey all that knowledge to the orchestra in a short amount of rehearsal time. 

All of this requires the conductor to have a clear sense of how the music should sound and the technical ability to convey that conception to a large group of musicians before they play;  it’s worth remembering that every gesture you see a conductor making happens before  the sound it is meant to influence has occurred.  There would be no point in a conductor gesturing for a sound after  the sound has been played!  In rehearsal, the conductor can stop the orchestra and explain, in words, why the sound the orchestra is producing is not what the conductor hopes to hear, but conductors must be careful to not interrupt the flow of playing too much;  orchestras don’t enjoy listening to the conductor’s voice.

Having one person do the work of a conductor is a much more efficient way of shaping an interpretation than having the entire orchestra try to reach consensus.  Orchestras with no conductor can function, but usually only when one player, or a small group of players, takes on the conductor’s role, and they often require much more time to rehearse a work than orchestras who have conductors take.  And when the forces required to perform a piece get too large – anything written later than, arguably, Beethoven or anything with choirs – then conductors are irreplaceable.  Sometimes there really is a need for a traffic cop.

It is impossible, in a short space, to describe everything conductors do.  But I hope I have given you the sense that what you see in concert is only a small part of the conductor’s job and that most of the work is done sitting at a desk or in rehearsal.  Now, whether a teacher’s job is comparable to that of a conductor is not for me to say.  It is certainly true that conductors are teachers in a sense, but their job is to teach the audience about a piece of music through the medium of performance, not to teach the music to the musicians, all of whom are highly trained and experienced professionals who don’t need to be taught much and who would certainly resent the attempt.  The best way for you to decide, I would suggest, is to go to as many concerts as you can, observe what the conductor is doing, and form your own conclusions.  And you’ll enjoy the experience!

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Letters of Recommendation

It is unusual to have the chance to see a conductor rehearse an orchestra, but early in his career the great Carlos Kleiber allowed a rehearsal of his to be filmed.  This video is in black and white and the rehearsal is in German (although with very small English subtitles) but it gives a sense of what conductors do and how they do it.  Kleiber was uniquely talented, and orchestras would accept some of his more eccentric flights of fancy more than they would from other, lesser, conductors (and even then, you can see this orchestra growing frustrated with him sometimes) but as a chance to see a conductor at work, this film is unparalleled. 

Q of the Week

The Q of the Week this week is a Quote from Richard Strauss, a great conductor as well as composer:

  Never look encouragingly at the brass, except to give an important cue.

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Fortunately, I have teaching assistants to help me manage this reality of the course we teach together. I tell them that one of our goals is to hide the jalopy-ness of the course from our students as much as possible, so they don’t stress that the whole thing is about to come apart. (Which it never really is, but it might give that impression sometimes).

So some days - well, I feel like more of a traffic cop than a teacher. A lot of my time is spent coordinating short presentations by my TAs in class, preparing my own presentations, speaking with students after class, or later in office hours, preparing a signup sheet for student group conferences next week, contacting two external teachers for one after-hours session they do with each of my students, providing feedback on 125 pages of their output, responding to emails - some light, some quite substantive. And on and on.

Is this normal? Is your teaching life like this too? Is it just that I am getting older, and I notice it more? Am I trying to do too much?

Some days, I would like to put a better spin on it. I would like to think that a better analogy is not Traffic Cop, but rather that I am an orchestra conductor. I do that carefully, as one of my favorite music jokes reminds me: What is the difference between a bull and an orchestra conductor?

With a bull, the horns are in front and the ass is in back.

But teaching is like music, isn’t it? It has a rhythm and meter. It goes in cycles, and even occasionally repeats. It starts and takes off with a score (syllabus), and you can’t just stop until the music (semester) is over. It has climaxes - hills and valleys, loud and soft passages. And, at its best, it can lift the spirits, and be transformative.

That’s it! I would rather be an orchestra conductor, with the players my students, following a score I have composed but each of them put their own interpretation on, which - in the end - is uplifting and beautiful, and that comes together in magical moments that are hard to describe or pin down. That everyone is glad to have heard and participated in at the end of the year.

I will let you know if I can make any progress from Traffic Cop to Orchestra Conductor. Where are you on that spectrum?

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Letters of Recommendation

A few weeks ago I wrote about what impact on our students might come from their having access to digital photos and video of themselves throughout their growing up years. This week’s issue of The New Yorker magazine has a wonderful article on this question, taken from a different perspective, by Joshua Rothman called Becoming You: Are you the same person you were when you were a child?

Q of the Week

The Q of the Week this week is a Quote from the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov:

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

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A lot of the problem is the press. As technology has grown in influence over the last several decades, news outlets have hired technology writers, and published a steady stream of their work. In an effort to fill column inches, they tend to speculate about tech that mostly exists in press releases, and is not yet a shipping product. Sometimes, they breathlessly repeat what they have been told by very skillful marketing executives at tech companies, in an effort to grab eyeballs with the latest thing. It is also driven by an effort - I think - not to be left behind. To avoid being the last media outlet to recognize that change was coming.

I understand all of that - we all do. But what happens next is what I am more concerned about.

Primarily because of this onslaught of reporting, we - leaders, teachers, administrators - are often distracted away from the hard conversations. And particularly administrators don’t mind that - I think they even like it. It helps them sound like they can predict the future - something we all wish our leaders could do. But for them, it is easier to talk about some distant future that makes us sound smart than it is to move our faculty even one or two steps in the direction we need now. It reminds me of Dug the dog in the animated Pixar movie classic “Up,” who gets continually distracted by seeing a “Squirrel!”

We get distracted by the latest shiny “total change” toy, and it can take our attention away from critical issues in education that we need to be wrestling with instead. MOOCs, Artificial Intelligence, VR - the list goes on. There were rivers of ink spilled about how MOOCs were going to change education forever. It was bunk. But the meetings, the hard decisions to play or not to play - it took us away from working on much more important topics.

What we tend to do is examine the latest thing, briefly, for fear it may change everything and when satisfied that it will not, we move on. We make pronouncements that education in the near future will all take place virtually. That robots will teach our students. It’s all bunk. And it’s free - in 5 years, no one will remember we said that, and ask us to account for doing so.

It is not only bunk, I will go so far as to say it is irresponsible future gazing at the expense of the hard work we should be doing now. And it is easier – and lazier – than engaging with hard changes that need to be begun, some of them urgently.

A recent example was how we focused on the “threat” of MOOCs instead of doing the hard work of preparing for a hybrid online future. Local, teacher-based, student-focused, hybrid learning. And what happened? We were not ready for the pandemic, and much disruption - and poor educational outcomes - occurred as a result.

What if we had a concrete 10 year plan, and adjusted it as necessary as each 10 year period unfolded? What if we executed on that plan, and avoided wasting time speculating about how everyone is going to go to school in their VR headsets all day? It won’t happen, so let’s stop talking about it, and talk about how to do hybrid learning well.

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Letters of Recommendation

If you have not seen the movie mentioned here - Up! - you really should. That is my recommendation for the week. Bring it up on your streaming service of choice. Here is the official trailer:

Q of the Week

The Q of the Week this week is a Quote from the poet Pádraig Ó Tuama:

We are interested in holding wonder in one hand and work in the other. Wonder at all we do not understand; work to support each other, help each other, learn, commit, change, and improve. 

Share The Chalkboard Life

In my newsletter last March, I took the position that attending a remote conference from the comfort and convenience of your own home was a net good. But I admitted that it felt like something was missing.

Now, 2.5 years into the pandemic, we have learned that we still need to be with each other. There is just something human, and invaluable, about being together. Seeing each other in-person, in the flesh, and observing body language as well as speech inflections, neither of which we might have picked up over Zoom. Sharing a meal together, as humans have for millennia, is hard to replicated online. And it remains difficult to introduce yourself to another person in a chat box. It just does.

As I noted more than a year ago, we convey so much more information in-person than we do on a screen. Screens only show your head and shoulders (usually), and not fully revealing of your full humanity even at that. After all, Zoom has a feature to “Touch up my Appearance.” Not that I have ever used it or anything. Uhh. OK, I use it all the time. (But you don’t have to confess that you do too.)

Conferences are not fully back yet. At the same conference on the same themes in September of 2019 - just five months before everything shut down - we had 165 attendees, and I had to turn people away at the last because we had reached capacity for the rooms we were using. This time, there does seem to be some “depression” of our numbers. I was expecting around 75-80 but we will actually have 110 at this conference. Not quite the numbers we had the last time, but more than a respectable showing.

I have had a few people express interest in attending the conference virtually, and I have turned them down. As I have noted here before, I believe our future is hybrid, and that means for this conference that four of the presentations will be a mixed in-person and online speaker panels. Each of those four people joining us remotely to present had a last-minute medical or family issue that prevented them from attending.

And of course, all of the presentations will be taped and posted to the conference website, as it was previously. So it is hybrid in that way as well.

But we really wanted a conference like the last one, which brought thought leaders in this area together for in-person interactions, discussions, and sharing. So we are not allowing non-attendees to attend the conference remotely. That seems harsh, but of course if you think about the complexities about putting on a conference for 110 people, with food and drinks, program, attendee list, and and…. Well, putting on two conferences at the same time, well, that would cause me to retire. And posting all of the presentations a week or so after they have occurred effectively offers the same thing as attending it “remotely” (with the possible exception of being able to ask a question, live).

We’ll see how it goes. We will have those blueberry muffins with the crunchy bits on top, and people will meet over the coffee urn, and I will report back. In the meantime, please share what you are doing about attending conferences in-person, and what you find to be different between those conferences and those that take place fully remotely.

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Letters of Recommendation

As I have mentioned, I am studying classical piano as an adult student. Three years into this, I can sort of play a Chopin Etude (Op. 28, No. 4), and remain engaged and enjoying the work. Recently, I have been thinking of mixing in popular music. (Secretly, I suppose I have always wanted to be that person at the party who can play all the well known tunes.) So why not start with Billy Joel’s Piano Man? A classic of the canon. Here is a rousing rendition of the song that he did at Shea Stadium in 2008.

Q of the Week

The Q of the Week this week is a Quote from the 20th Century Russian short story writer Isaac Babel:

No iron spike can pierce the human heart as icily as a period in the right place.

Share The Chalkboard Life

Most writers enjoy two periods of happiness - when a glorious idea comes to mind, and secondly, when a last page has been written and you haven’t had time to know how much better it ought to be.

- J.B. Priestly

Well, I don’t know how “glorious” the idea was to begin with. It describes a vision for a future of legal education that is more open, hybrid, and student-focused. But I certainly understand Priestly’s sentiment, and for me the period after writing the last page and knowing how much better it ought to be is rather small. Where I am right now about the book is well captured in the well-worn phrase, attributed originally to the French poet Paul Valéry:

No piece of writing was ever finished. It is merely abandoned.

It could always be improved. But at some point - usually after you have blown through a half-dozen deadlines and a dozen drafts - it is time to let it go and hope for the best. Asked why he rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms 39 times, Ernest Hemingway said:

I wanted to get the words right.

Last week’s issue of The New Yorker has a lovely portrait written by Darryl Pinckney about a writing mentor he had, whom he quotes saying this:

Anyone who can’t bring himself or herself to face the pain of revision can’t be a real writer.

- Elizabeth Hardwick

Ah, the pain of revision. We have written something, and we know what we meant to say, but to go through it as a (critical) reader can indeed be painful. But it is absolutely necessary. I tried to push myself to not skimp on the time spent in revision and avoid the temptation to just run to the point of getting to the “abandonment” stage as soon as possible. One thing that helped so much this time around was two colleagues who gave me a precious gift: they read the entire thing and wrote extensive comments for me. This gave me the boost I needed to get through the last several rounds of revisions. I had a student help me with some footnotes, and a librarian to find a few resources. Writing is such a solitary task, so this kind of help can be so valuable. Most critically, it makes you feel less alone.

Three months seems to me to be quite reasonable to finish a book, if you can get right down to it.

- Agatha Christie

Grr…. Someone asked me a couple of weeks ago how long it took to write this book. Unfortunately, I have several long and tedious answers to that simple question. A week. 18 months. 8 years. It took a week on my annual working retreat to conceptually pull an early draft and various notes and outlines together into one complete draft. I left that time thinking I was almost there, but my wife brought me back to earth when she memorably said (after I described what I was able to get done on that trip): “Oh, you have a complete ball of dough now.” Ah, yes. That is all I have actually, you are correct.

To get to the stage before the “ball of dough” took about a year of writing pieces of it, rereading my research pile, revising the outline, etc. I could not have written the complete book proposal to my publisher articulating the full scope of the book unless I had done that grinding work. I started that stage 18 months ago.

But in a sense, this book really has been with me for 8 years. I have been forming the thinking that is now fully expressed in this book for at least that long. The first talk in which I presented some of these ideas was in 2014. And I have written shorter articles addressing these themes over that 8 years. Some of what is now in the book has been first worked out here in this newsletter (see, for example, Not All Content Fits in All Containers).

Many people have a book in them, but it takes a special kind of freak to leave the Land of Laziness, cross the Plains of Procrastination and go around Insecurity Mountain, find the blade of No One Made You Do This, and use it to cut your chest open and yank that book out.

— Gabino Iglesias

This quote captures most closely what the experience of writing both of my books has felt like. (At this point I am sure I start sounding like a lunatic, so by all means stop reading here). But it really has - both times - felt like there was something in my chest crawling around interrupting a perfectly good night’s sleep living in a damp cloud over my head while I was walking in a trance thinking about how to express a complex thought and did I need a footnote for that and if so what exactly would be the right source? Constantly. On and on. And on. In the last few months, it has felt like a 50 lb. weight has been sitting on my chest. I am glad to say, I feel lighter already!

Making a living is nothing. The great difficulty is making a point, making a difference. - Elizabeth Hardwick

Ah, yes. And honestly, who knows if it will? I have quoted Saul Bellow before - ask a writer why he/she is a writer and they will always say they have to be - and I felt that way. I had to write this thing. I can’t express why exactly. For a long time, the only way I could avoid “Insecurity Mountain” was to tell myself that I didn’t care if anyone read it, I just had to do it. Of course now that I am (mostly) finished, I hope someone does read it, and that it makes a difference. But none of that is up to me now. It has been abandoned.

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Letters of Recommendation

This week, instead of a book or piece of music, I am going to recommend a piece of software. It is called Scrivener, and runs on both Mac and PC, iPads too. It was created by a programmer in the UK, Keith Blount. I have written both of my books in this software, and many others have written many more books with it. Why is it special? Because, unlike Word, it handles large, complex writing projects well, and holds your research and progress and outlines and drafts all in one cohesive whole. It makes it look like you have a book already, when you, ah… might only have a ball of dough. Until you are ready to export what you have in Scrivener to Word, and then work on it more, revise a lot more, and finally, abandon it.

Q of the Week

The Q of the Week this week is a Quote from the brilliant novelist and short story writer, George Saunders, from his excellent newsletter about the vulnerability that good writing requires:

Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more.

Share The Chalkboard Life

That phrase came back to me when I was thinking about this week’s topic. And today I find myself writing about a topic I know little about, and I need your help.

So here is what I am wondering. When I was young, my parents divorced, and we lived with my mother. She did not have a camera, so there were not very many photos of me when I was a small person. Not no pictures, just not many. Sometimes we would purchase a disposable camera with film in it, and get those developed. Occasionally other people would take photos and give them to us. So I do have a few.

The 60s and 70s was a time when home movies started being more available, but it was still pretty rare, and certainly not something we had. So I also have no video of myself as a child.

You see where I am going with this, right? Today, many (most?) of our students have lived in an era where digital photo and video technology was cheaply and widely available. Most of their parents took literally thousands of photos of them at a young age. Video too. And when the children were able to take photos, they took them themselves, which came to be known as selfies. Over their lives, if they wanted to remember something, or examine it again, they could go to the videotape.

I find with my own children that with photos of themselves as a young person they find them “cute” and like seeing them, but it’s not something they dwell on. With video, they are a little embarrassed to see themselves as a little person, playing with blocks, or kicking a soccer ball, or whatever moment I might have captured. But what effect it has on them to see these photos and videos I can’t really tell.

What I am interested in is this question: what effect on our students has their regularly seeing digital captures of themselves throughout their young lives?

Here is my guess, but I want to hear from you as well. Like everything with technology, it has been a double-edged sword. I think it is likely that, in many cases, it has given our students a sense of confidence and strong sense of self. On the other hand, many young people have had bad experiences posting pictures of themselves on social media, and this can be very harming to their confidence and sense of self.

How does this affect our teaching of these students? Does it have no net affect overall? Does it help some, and hurt others? Most importantly, is this something we can use to make our teaching more effective in ways we have not yet considered? Please leave a comment to weigh in - I need your thoughts on this!

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Letters of Recommendation

This week, I am recommending the book by Warner Wolf (co-written with Larry Weisman) that tells the story of his career in sports broadcasting: Let’s Go to the Videotape: All the Plays and Replays from My Life in Sports.

(Interesting recent story about Mr. Wolf, who is in his 80s now. In February of 2019, he turned himself in and was arrested for removing some of the letters from the sign outside the development in Florida where he lives, Classics Plantation Estates. He had already complained at a homeowner’s association meeting that the use of the term “Plantation” was racist, and should be removed. They denied the request, and so he did it himself. He ended up paying restitution for damages.)

Q of the Week

The Q of the Week this week is a Quote from the American poet Ezra Pound:

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,

Lend me a little tobacco-shop,

or install me in any profession

Save this damn’d profession of writing,

where one needs one’s brains all the time.

Share The Chalkboard Life

The post included a picture of a sign she had printed and placed on her office door that read (I’m paraphrasing): “My Office Hours are anytime I am here.”

I do not respond to most of the posts I see on Twitter, particularly ones I disagree with. The internet has plenty of disagreement without my adding to it, that’s for sure. But I did respond to this one, and said something like: “Is this really the idea of Office Hours?” The original poster responded with “Yes, isn’t this great? They can come see me at all kinds of times of day. I am very available to my students.”

I did not follow up. But the exchange has been bugging me ever since. So I thought I would expand on it here, so I can learn from your reactions - which may, of course, disagree with mine! But:

I always thought the idea of Office Hours was to set a time/place every week when students could rely on your being there and available to answer questions. Time when they do not have to set up an appointment, or wander by your office several times and hope they catch you there.

The moment when a student has a question is a precious one and brittle too, and I’m afraid we often lose sight of that. If the student has worked up to a point where they can articulate a question to you, they have opened up a window for learning - for making the sorts of connections you are trying to teach them to make.

We often lament the advent of email in education, but here’s the thing that is great about it: email has helped us reach students in those moments. As much as I don’t prefer it sometimes, if I check my email at night before bed, and a student has written a thoughtful email that shows they just have that *one* or *two* more connections they need to make… well - recognizing that our students often work on the homework we give them at night - I make an effort answer it right away.

So email is already the “reach me any time of day” kind of office hours.

But the “traditional” kind - where there is a set time and place they can always depend on you to be available to them - those I think we also need to preserve, for several reasons. (Before my list, let me note that it is important to set that time and day with their schedules in mind, so you know they are free at that time.)

First, it lowers the effort required on the part of the student, which helps some of them. They are not quite at the point where they can express their question in writing, but they are close. Second, it puts a premium on their doing their thinking and question preparation work - it gives them a sort of “deadline” for it. Like this: “Heck, I know I have a question, and I need to ask my teacher. I know she is available tomorrow from 2-4, so I had better put the studying in to make sure I am ready for that conversation.” Third, it makes it so they do not have to make an appointment, which they might feel reluctant to do, particularly if they feel uncertain of the material or the question (as they usually do). Finally, they can reliably schedule the visit - and fit it in - between other classes they are taking, or extracurricular activities they are involved in.

If one just says: “My office hours are whenever you find me here,” that’s fine, but it is not office hours. Doing that increases the barrier to you rather than decreases it. It requires that they wander by your office at many times of day, hoping to find you there, not in a meeting, or on the phone. It raises the ante for them interrupting whatever you were doing when they came by. It reduces the benefit of a deadline on their getting ready to see you to ask their question. And they can’t schedule it in between classes in a reliable way.

By all means, have an open door policy. But also post office hours.

Now, while I am on the subject, because the pandemic moved office hours to Zoom, we discovered this new venue was pretty convenient (for us and for our students). This semester, when we are no longer in masks - and seem to be pretending the pandemic is over - we could return to Office Hours in-person. And I absolutely prefer in-person interaction with my students - who doesn’t? There is something intangible, human, about being face-to-face. We are analog beings, after all. And I think it helps us to break down the barriers between us and our students. They see us as flesh and blood humans, just like they are.

However, the convenience afforded by conducting Office Hours over Zoom can not be denied. It allows the student to reach you wherever they are, or need to be at that time. They (generally) do not have to wait outside your office, and Zoom can be more private than an open office door. So my “middle ground” on this - so far - is to post Zoom links for a weekly schedule of office hour time, and to also offer in-person meetings on an appointment basis, or “walking” meetings around campus if they prefer.

Please let me know your thoughts about this, and how you post and use Office Hours (if you do).

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Letters of Recommendation

This week, I am recommending a new piece of music composed by the American composer William Bolcom. It is his second piano concerto, played by Igor Levit and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. This is the world premier of the piece, which took place as part of the Heidelberg Früeling Music Festival a few months ago:

Q of the Week

The Q of the Week this week is a Quote from the astronomer Carl Sagan:

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

Share The Chalkboard Life

But I would argue they should not be uncomfortable with it. I believe that feeling deeply connected, if you will, to your work is almost always a good thing.  It helps with motivation, but more importantly, it helps with how you present yourself in your work.  Last week, Lisa Caldwell reminded us that many teachers use their own money to give their students what they believe they need, and indeed this is true (I am doing it myself next week!).  Teachers do such things because they do not perceive what they do as a “job” but rather something they are more deeply motivated and connected to than just a job.  Sure, they want to be treated fairly and properly compensated for what they do - of course - but the money is rarely what motivates a teacher to be a teacher.

The next question, which I posed last week and will try to address this week is: well, if we feel called to the work we do, how do we help our students to feel called to the work they will do?

Some people were freakishly clear from an early age on what they felt called to do with their lives.  My (other) uncle always knew he wanted to be a priest, like his father. A concert pianist will often tell you that they always knew that is what they wanted to be.  In kindergarten (yes, I taught kindergarten once), children are of the age where they are beginning to understand the concept of different jobs, and are often asked what “they want to be when they grow up.”  It’s a silly question that is often asked by adults who don’t know what else to say to a young person.  But that early, children will have usually have an answer: “A Fireman,” “A Policewoman,” “A pilot,” etc.

The thing is, call to certain work comes at different times in one’s life, and in different ways.  But that just makes it harder - but not impossible - to help our students find where “their deep gladness, and the world’s deep need, meet.”

If it happens in different ways at different times in one’s life, well, then it stands to reason that it should be “taught” in different ways for different ages and grades of students.  Perhaps that is why kindergarten teachers help their young charges to learn about different jobs - they feel that is an appropriate time for them to begin considering what they feel motivated to do.  Later in schooling, obviously it takes different forms.  In high school, parents are often asked to come in and speak about what they do to an assembly.  I guess the assumption is that students will hear those parents, and feel a call to that work. Or perhaps what they do *not* want to do.

By the time a student is in University, they should probably be getting better help and support around these questions.  Many schools have a “Career Services Center” but are not those mostly glorified job boards?  Yes, they have counselors who meet with students, but how many students come in and say: “I have no idea, can you help me?”  And if they do that, are the career services counselors ready to help in a way that will help students find their call?

The bottom line for me is that I do not think we talk about this enough.  It should be a regular and accepted part of the pedagogy of each year of schooling (and graduate school). But I also do not think we have enough tools and developed pedagogy around this subject either.  But we should.

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Letters of Recommendation

Today’s letter of recommendation, in concert with the theme this week, is a book by Nicolas Pearce, The Purpose Path, A Guide to Pursuing Your Authentic Life’s Work, which should be helpful to us as educators to help our students with these kinds of questions.

Q of the Week

The Q of the Week this week is a Quote from Oprah Winfrey:

I believe there's a calling for all of us. I know that every human being has value and purpose. The real work of our lives is to become aware. And awakened. To answer the call.

The “call” for a life path, a career, or similarly consuming part of your life, is not a term that is used very much in everyday life. “I got a new job that I like,” or “I’m am a teacher.” But in one area it is used more widely: when a church “calls” a priest to lead the congregation. It is said also that the priest should feel the “call” to that parish. Last week, I told the story of my grandfather, who because of a violent act against the church where he was a fill-in, he felt called to stay and help. And stayed there for the rest of his life.

But I would like to suggest that our conception of being “called” to our work should be broadened. And that we should teach our students to see their lives that way as well.

The novelist Saul Bellow once said this:

If you ever meet someone and ask them what they do and they say “I’m a writer,” ask them why. They will always give you the same answer: “Because I have to.”

So right there, I think that is part of what being “called” to do certain work means. If you could not imagine doing anything else, if you feel like you just have to do what you do, well, that is probably a sign of a call.

Ideally, I think, we want and should feel called to our work. And not just teachers, lawyers, and doctors, but everyone. You might think, well, a bus driver is just doing a job - that’s never a “calling.” But if you asked, many of them would disagree. They feel they are conducting an important public service because… they are. Police and Fire and EMTs - they are all putting their lives on the line because they feel called, or - if you prefer - even just “pulled” to do the work. While they might not talk about it much, the ones I have known in those jobs do, privately, regularly reflect on its importance to our social fabric as part of their motivation to do the work. Librarian. Garbage Collector. City Water Engineer. Take a moment to think about a job you have thought invisible and merely a job and imagine someone in that job who feels a vocational calling to do that work. Many, even most, do.

I had a mentor who died two years ago - and whom I miss every day - and once I asked him about this. “How do you know you are called to do something?” He said: “Look for patterns.” He meant - are things lining up for you? Do you see it everywhere, in some way or other? Are obstacles to you doing that work disappearing, or are they growing?

This week, Frederick Buechner, died at the age of 96. He was an author and Presbyterian minister who wrote many notable books, often infused with theology. And he wrote movingly about life and one’s life work. About call, he said this:

You are called to the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep need, meet.

If you have not heard that quote before, it is worth reading again. (Go ahead, I’ll wait).

For teachers, I think most of us have this sense of being called to the work. To enjoy it - most days - on the level of deep gladness. And, of course, the world has a continual deep need for teachers who feel called to the work. For me personally, I often think of Saul Bellow’s quote - I am a teacher because I have to be.

So if any of this about being called to do certain work resonates with you, did you feel called to teaching? If so, do you still feel that way? Please leave a comment below. I hope we can get a discussion going about how “call” works for teachers.

The next question then is how do we help our students to feel that way about the work they are with us preparing to do? That is the subject for next week’s newsletter. If you have ideas about that, please also add them to your comment, I would love to hear them.

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Letter of Recommendation

If you would like to know more about the concept of “Call” I can recommend Robert Hutnut’s book Call Waiting. It describes the many ways that a “call” can come to you. (I have only written about a couple of them here).

Q of the Week

The Q of the Week this week is a Quote from Frederick Buechner:

Listen to your Life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it no less than the excitement and the gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

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I make this effort, as many teachers do, because a person’s name is important. Each one contains a story about the person you are meeting, and getting to know their names is a way of honoring that story, and welcoming them to the community you are building in your class.

Last fall, when I was nearing one year of writing this newsletter, I mentioned that I was thinking about changing its focus somewhat. One of my most faithful readers, Joel Neff, encouraged changing focus on an annual basis, as he has done with his newsletter, Learned (which I have recommended before and do so again). He also mentioned, in the comments, that he would be interested in knowing more about me, and how I became a teacher.

Something funny happened this summer that I thought I would share, and that will lead me to tell a personal story about myself. It comes from the somewhat odd fact that I have two middle initials, and that my daughter met one of my former students on the bus this summer.

One of my daughter’s favorite games is when she meets a student from my school is that she asks them if they had me as a teacher, without first revealing why she is asking. It’s all in good fun. This summer, she met a former student on the bus - I had had him in class just last semester. During their conversation the student revealed that there was rampant speculation in the class over the last school year about what names my two middle initials stand for (about which I had no idea - we never know what our students wonder about us!) He revealed that the current consensus in the class was Ishmael Carver (my middle initials are I. C.). My daughter found this “10/10 hilarious,” and confirmed for him (only) that this bit of speculation was incorrect.

Having two middle initials has been somewhat of a burden for me, for primarily two reasons, one less important than the other. First, most database software can’t handle it, so they drop one (or the other) and it is never right but not that big a deal (until you are dealing with TSA - but that’s another story). Second, I learned years ago that people make assumptions about those with two middle names - that it is somehow snooty or upper crust or an indication of extreme privilege. So I thought I would tell the (real) story - perhaps my students from last year will see this, and it will clear up the matter. But I am also trying to illustrate something else - that all of our names have a story, and making assumptions about others through their names is generally to be avoided. So here it is - I hope you will tell your *own* name’s story in the Comments.

My mother’s parents were from Newfoundland at a time when it was its own country, not yet part of Canada. My grandfather was from Upper Island Cove, my grandmother from Fogo, a small island off the coast. My grandfather was from a family of 7 children, and his father died at sea when he was young, which caused him to be sent to an Uncle who had gone blind - so he had a home, and so the Uncle had some help. That Uncle knew large parts of the bible and the psalms by heart, and taught my grandfather to memorize them as well. Perhaps this is what lead him to attend McGill University (in Montreal) on a full scholarship, and then lead him to seminary to become an episcopal priest. Part of his studies included spending a year as a “gospel reader” in the upper reaches of Labrador where he tended a very small parish and lived through an extremely cold winter.

On the way from McGill to Labrador, he took a ship which stopped in St. John (Newfoundland), where my grandmother was working as a telegraph operator, having moved there from Fogo for the job. A distant relative of my grandfather who knew my grandmother, sent her to retrieve him from the boat and bring him to his home for an overnight stay before my grandfather continued to Labrador. She reluctantly did so, and the two - the story goes - fell in love “on first sight.” They were separated for several years, and wrote letters to each other nearly every day. We still have those letters.

After my grandfather graduated from seminary, he and my grandmother were married, and he was then looking for his first posting as a priest. He was sent to Connecticut to stay with the Bishop there, because in those days, Bishops had to find money in the budget to send you to a parish, and they often did not have it. But this Bishop knew another Bishop in Missouri who might be able to hire him, and sent my grandfather there. He and his young wife took the train to St. Louis with their first child in tow.

Soon after he arrived, the Bishop of Missouri sent him to a small town ninety miles north of St. Louis called Louisiana, on the Western bank of the Mississippi River. Calvary Episcopal church needed a priest, as did two other parishes in Pike County. He and his wife did not think much of the posting, and he found it difficult to serve three parishes simultaneously. The pay was meager, and the town was uninteresting to them. (My grandfather, for context, was even then fluent in Greek and Hebrew, and later became a well-known biblical scholar). He wrote to the Bishop that he would not be able to make a home for his family in rural Missouri, and that he would be going back to Connecticut.

At this time - around 1920 - the “second uprising” of the Ku Klux Klan was mostly focused on anti-Catholic hatred. In this small town, the members of the KKK apparently confused the Episcopal church with the Catholic Church, and went into Calvary, painted KKK symbols on the walls and tore up the prayer books. When this happened, my grandfather sent a telegram to the Bishop asking him to disregard his letter. He stated that he believed he had been called to serve this parish. He did so for the next 36 years.

While they were still a young family in this town, my mother was born in 1925, and her younger brother was born in 1927. My grandfather David Coombs and my grandmother Ethel Meek Irish came from a world where you named your children either using your own names, or (more commonly) after family members who had come before and who had died. They had three children: Richard Paul Coombs who was named after my grandmother’s father, Ethel Frances Margaret Coombs (my mother - she dropped Ethel and went by Frances, but Margaret was one of my grandfather’s sisters), and David Irish Coombs, the youngest.

David was much loved. The youngest in many families often gets away with more - he was the scamp, the cut up, and comfortable with the river and the bars. He worked in the post-office and in a factory during the summers to pay for school. My mother adored him, as did my father who met him in college.

On September 9, 1955, David was killed in a car accident while he was driving home from St. Louis to visit his Mom and Dad. His death devastated the town, not to mention his family. My mother never got over it.

When I was born, I was named David Irish Coombs Thomson. My grandfather baptized me with that name a few months after my birth. Often growing up, people assumed I was named for my father, whose name was also David. But I was named for an Uncle I never knew, and I have four names just as an artifact of carrying his full name, plus my father’s surname.

As much as the name has caused me problems - and incorrect assumptions about me over the years - I have worn it proudly (or tried to) because he meant so much to so many people, and his life was so tragically cut short.

Please leave a comment and tell your own name’s story. And let us remember how important our student’s names are, because each one contains a story that is important - maybe very important - to them and to their family.

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Letters of Recommendation

While we are on the subject of the priesthood, I thought I would recommend a book this week that I enjoyed a few years ago, and re-read this summer. It is a love story: The Monk Downstairs. A very enjoyable, light, summer read.

Q of the Week

The Quote of the Week this week is the text of my grandfather’s letter to the local paper thanking the town for their outpouring of love and support after the death of his youngest son, David Irish Coombs:

He Comes Not Again, For He is Here

As autumn clothes the banks and bluffs of our great river with the colors that come of the warm hazy days, and the crisp, clear nights, the voice of memory recalls how sweet this place and all its people were to our son David. He was a boy of the river, the country, and the town, knowing every landing, road and lane with the intimacy of the hand; knowing all who dwelt in every house, on every farm, and every one who went upon the waters.

His knowing came of working and living with the people on the river, the power lines, in the post-office, the factory. From school, college, army and from business, he returned with joy and gladness, for to him this was both home and haven; a place to renew the spirit and refresh the soul.

But he comes not again, for he is here, abiding forever in the place that gave him birth, and bred him to the life he lived so well; the life he spent with such a generous hand in enriching the lives of all his family, his friends and fellows. Home he is come from the city, from the crowd, to his home by the river; the river that runs on and on like time’s own stream, minding the memory of him who knew its deep currents and changing moods.

To all who have spoken their hearts to us in the home-coming of our son, we are most grateful.

David and Ethel Coombs

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