The Winning Course Evaluation

Here at UM, when you turn your grades in to the Registrar, she promptly hands you back your course evaluations, so you can retreat to the sanctity of your office and wonder whether you were too nice (or mean, as the case may be) in your grading... (it's really a bit unnerving to read the evals so shortly after submitting grades; maybe next time I won't!).

I wanted to emerge from the fog for a second, though, to share my favorite remark from an evaluation by a student in my first-year Civil Procedure class (this was basically the entire evaluation):

"Good low-post game -- soft touch for a guy his size.  A little slow getting back on defense -- needs to be more physical on the offensive boards."

That's what I get for playing basketball with my students, who, as it turns out, chose "Uncivil Procedure" as their team name, over my recommendation of "Debellatio," after they asked for an amusing-sounding legal term that started with the letter D.

[For the record, Black's defines debellatio as "[a] means of ending a war and acquiring territory when one of the belligerent countries has been so soundly defeated that its adversary is able to decide alone the fate of the defeated country's territory; conquest followed by annexation."]

Not bad for a basketball team, right?