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Wednesday, June 02, 2010
What a Student Owes His or Her Teacher
This is my first posting as a guest on PrawfsBlawg -- indeed, this is my first posting on any blog -- and I am grateful to be invited to participate in the conversation.
Teachers have duties to their students, of course. What those duties are and whether we live up to them might perhaps be subjects of some future postings.
But when we teach our students our subjects -- our disciplines -- we also are teaching them how to be students, how best to go about learning. What duties should we expect from our students? What expectations should we have of them?
I cannot improve on the insights of James V. Schall, S.J., Professor of Government, who teaches political philosophy at Georgetown University. Schall is a legendary teacher, one of those rare, life-changing teachers we all have been blessed with as students and wish we were more like as teachers. In an essay with the same title as this posting, he identifies the four duties students owe their teachers:
- Trust: the benefit of the doubt that the teacher knows the subject and has a planned course of study
- Docility: a modicum of humility that is a willingness to be taught
- Effort: a willingness to invest the time and attention to learn
- Thinking:engaging the material in a purposeful and mindful manner
When I observe one of my 1L students failing in one of these duties, I ask the student to come to my office. Often, I give the student a copy of Schall's essay and invite the student to come back after s/he has read and reflected on it.
What do you think of the idea that students owe their teachers certain duties? What duties do you think your students owe you? How do you get across your expectations to your students?
(I have attached here a PDF file copy of Schall's essay, from his book Another Sort of Learning -- which is an excellent read for students and teachers alike: Download Schall - Another Sort of Learning.)
Posted by Thomas Baker on June 2, 2010 at 06:14 PM | Permalink
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Comments
You've mangled the title with political correctness. The original title DIDN'T include "or Her."
Posted by: Springo | Sep 30, 2014 9:52:16 PM
Students are paying (roughly $20k semester) for a service: instruction. They don't really owe much besides avoiding disrupting the learning experience of other students that have paid for the same service.
Trust- is a rebuttable presumption, especially after 1L. You assume the employee (teacher) is competent because of the reputation of the employer (university), but this may not always be the case and employers sometimes make mistakes.
Docility- is typically a characteristic of mediocre minds. Willingness to learn is invaluable; "willingness to be taught" is not valuable unless the teacher is helpful in the learning process (which may or may not be the case, see above).
Thinking- is probably worthwhile but also completely optional: the student is paying the teacher to teach; the teacher is not paying the student to think.
So, I think the "duty" language is completely inappropriate. The rhetoric of trust, docility etc. is unintentionally (?) referring to the apprentice/master relationship. But note that the apprentice is the employee of the master and so obviously owes duties.
How a student can get the most out of their $40k/year is, of course, a different question. I think a better analogy would be the customer/barber: the barber (teacher) owes a duty of competence, the customer is well advised to pay attention to what is going on and give responsible feedback in order to get the best service possible.
Condescending invitations to the Professor's office to discuss why a student has failed to understand the master/apprentice dynamic seems harmlessly delusional, at best.
Posted by: Matt | Jun 7, 2010 11:55:39 PM
Thanks to Bill Bridge, Tom & Rick Garnett for reinforcing the theme in my posting: the student-teacher relationship is spiritual, as James Schall writes in the essay I attached, because "each is related to something else outside of each" in the activity of learning, which is "mostly independent of the personal." Each side ought to bring a sense of duty to that kind of special relationship.
For the skeptical anonymous student commentators, if you take the time to read the Schall's essay, and still don't get it, all I can say is that I tried. I do hope you someday encounter a teacher like him.
Posted by: Thomas E. Baker | Jun 7, 2010 9:01:23 AM
Thanks for this, Tom. I'm a big fan of Schall's "Another Sort of Learning" and agree that, in the context of a law school -- where law-teachers are, among other things, socializing law students into the norms and values of a learned profession and its traditions -- it *is* worth thinking about what students owe their teachers (as well as vice-versa).
Posted by: Rick Garnett | Jun 6, 2010 3:32:17 PM
If you're going to engage in the activity of learning, you owe that activity (and those co-participants in it who are teachers) the attitudes and effort required for the activity to bear fruit. What you owe to the activity and what you owe to yourself are in this case the same; giving less than is demanded shortchanges both learning and yourself.
Posted by: Tom | Jun 5, 2010 12:42:45 PM
Oh come on. Students owe respectful behavior to their professors. If anything, they have heightened duties to each other. They don't owe effort/engagement/etc. to their professors.
Specifically with respect to benefit of the doubt, it's usually pretty obvious how well the professor knows the subject matter and whether she or he has a planned course of study. If you're doing something weird and you actually have a reason for it, offer an explanation -- I don't see why teachers who aren't putting in the effort or have no idea what they're doing are owed the benefit of the doubt.
Posted by: anoners | Jun 4, 2010 11:21:34 PM
I like the idea of reciprocal duties, and have downloaded the essay to read more carefully. The usefulness of the reading may be in its shock value to students who approach higher education as customers rather than as apprentices. I do understand the problems of power differential, discrimination, and abuse, but the solutions are to guard against those dangers, not to deny that students are more (not less) than buyers of education.
Posted by: Bill Bridge | Jun 3, 2010 10:30:30 AM
yes the student "owes" these things (morally of course-not in an actual enforceable way-except to the extent of grading-which is somewhat independent of these things in law school-because the ability to issues spot and analyze better than the other members of the class is mostly predetermined before law school by at mix of nature or nurture and not due to much effort-also even the base level of effort can bee made up quickly with a commercial outline and a few practice tests the days before the final)
furthermore, of course, as you admit-the professor also "owes" the students things (which are very much unenforceable-unless not only the professor acts in an outrageous manor-but also he does so in a way the student can prove and can convince a professional college the professor is friends with and the student is not friends with that even modest remedial action is warranted)
so when the professor does violates the things "owed" to the student his only "real" (though inadequate and symbolic) remedy-is self help-i.e. to default on the few things he "owes" the professor.
Posted by: guy | Jun 3, 2010 1:01:47 AM
As a current law student, I think the only thing I owe my professors is respectful attentiveness if I choose to sit through their lectures. Everything else I owe only to myself.
Posted by: Sra | Jun 3, 2010 12:43:45 AM
Other than common politeness, I'm not sure why students "owe" professors anything. Professors are not volunteers. If anything, students owe effort and thinking to each other--i.e., the value I get out of class is diminished if other students are not prepared and not thinking.
Posted by: anon | Jun 2, 2010 11:03:05 PM
I have to disagree with trust and docility. There are certainly professors out there who deserve neither because they are sexist (discourage or disparage female students, particularly in the STEM majors) or become romantically involved with their students during the time they have power over them.
I'd opt instead for mutual respect, as long as the other does nothing to destroy it.
The other imperative is do your best, again for both professor and student.
That covers effort and thinking. If both do their best, the semester goes well, but if either gets lazy, it is the student who loses out.
Posted by: A N | Jun 2, 2010 10:54:57 PM
Focusing the student on his or her duty to the professor often is an out-of-the-ordinary educational experience for him or her. "Never thought about it that way . . ." The idea that sticks might be called giving the prof -- me -- "the benefit of the doubt" that I have teaching experience with the subject and with law school that informs my plan for the course. It gets across that I have a reason for doing whatever seems different or unusual to the student in his or her first impression.
It gives me an opening to demonstrate that I know what I am doing, or at least that I know why I am doing it.
Over the course of the semester, it almost always happens that the student will make a point of coming by later to tell me that he or she understands why I teach con law the way I teach con law.
I keep copies of the Schall essay on hand and I pass it out to a few students every semester. Sometimes I post it on the web page for my course, to broadcast it to the whole class, when I think that is appropriate.
Posted by: Thomas E. Baker | Jun 2, 2010 10:37:38 PM
I'm curious what responses you've gotten from the 1Ls whom you engage one-on-one with the Schall essay (which I enjoyed reading, btw). Do they respond favorably in your office? Does it change the way they participate in class thereafter?
Posted by: aspiringlawprof | Jun 2, 2010 8:02:50 PM
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