Monday, June 15, 2015

Should the cats get teaching credits?

The NYU Law homepage has an article about first-year reading groups, which we did at the law school for the first time last year. Two of my stealth teaching assistants are mentioned at the front of the article. Seymour would like everyone to know that only Buddy is interested in people's food. Gary and Sylvester were too shy of strangers to participate.

As the article mentions, last year my first-year reading group slogged through Piketty. This coming year, I am considering opting for a rather different approach, in which we would watch episodes of The Paper Chase (the TV series, not the movie).

I had never seen the TV show, although the movie was standard fare on college and law school campuses back in the day. But after watching the pilot episode, I can report that, while (mercifully) it's extremely dated, this potentially adds interest, and it could certainly feed discussion concerning teacher-student interactions, law as an intellectual topic, law as a profession, class, and gender. (Race, too?  I believe the pilot was all-white.)

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