Happy Millennial Mother's Day!

As the mother of two Millennials (girls, ages 4 1/2 and 7), I can tell you that it's good work if you can get it.

Although I've heard the stories of "helicopter parents" -- usually some tale of inappropriate parental involvement told with disdain -- the reality can be very touching. For example, I was privileged to be at Seton Hall around Valentine's Day for Prof. Paula Franzese's "Loving the Law" celebration with her Property students. On that day, students, professors, and guests celebrated their love affair with the law and their love for those who love the law.

Students invited honored guests from their lives, often parents. I watched as parents flanked their law student children proudly. The law students gave touching homages to the parents who had inspired and supported them in their pursuit of a legal career. Parents spoke proudly of their law student children who had shone joy into every corner of their lives. Parents also spoke, often a bit teary-eyed, about how grateful they were that their children were being nurtured into the profession. It was an outpouring of genuine love and connection that I just don't think would have gone quite the same way with my Xer peers and our parents.

I tried to imagine that same celebration 15 years ago, and the whole thing went quickly downhill in my mind as me and my friends sat tensely between our parents, who didn't send us to law school to be nurtured like flowers but to be tempered like steel. (I could just hear my dad saying, "What the hell????" as my friends and I cast desperate glances at each other as we prayed to be sucked into the floor.) Say what you want about "helicopter parents," but that parenting style has accomplished quite a bit. My Millennial students are, for the most part, motivated, hard-working, soft-hearted, respectful, and justice-seeking. It's what I'd want from a lawyer; it's what I want for my daughters.

So congratulations Millennial Moms! You've done good.

New Orleans Day 3 (4/22)

You might wonder why the gap between describing Day 2 and Day 3 in New Orleans. The truth is that I am of two minds about New Orleans schools. We were taken on a tour of New Orleans schools in Day 3 to help us figure out how to write a brochure (well, to help the students write a brochure; my job was strictly formatting) that helps displaced New Orleanians get their kids back in school. I was left with a pretty optimistic picture of New Orleans schools, despite rumblings here and there that things weren't going well everywhere. When I got back, a New York Times story about New Orleans schools made the picture considerably murkier. And frankly, 38 years of southern racism indoctrination make it hard for my Indignation Meter to register some injustices as high as it ought to. I come from a deeply racist time, place, and people. I appreciated going to New Orleans with native Northeasterns, who instinctively spot racism and injustice that it's taken me two decades of intentional education to be able to spot.

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. So rather than try to describe what I saw, I've linked the pictures with some explanatory captions.

Here's what may not come through in the pictures and what's most relevant to this blog. The students (all Millennials in this group) were both fun and professional to work with. A lot of good lawyering went on during this day and Day 4. They were thinking about the client (Common Ground) and the client's clients (people who needed information about the school system). They asked good, insightful questions, and they didn't shy away from asking difficult, pointed questions -- but they did it respectfully and professionally. I saw nary a Millennial try to hog the spotlight or show off. It was purely a team effort. What was really impressive was how they could be daffy 20-somethings in the car (see first few photos) and switch immediately into professional mode when it was time to work. Enjoy the pictures!

P.S. We're about 50 shy of that 101 Classroom Uses for a Cellphone, so keep 'em comin'!

101 Classroom Uses for a Cellphone

Steve Demby gets us started with ten that he thought of off the top of his head, but I'm determined that we can come up with 92 more. There are both students and professors who read this blog, so what can you think of (that's constructive and serves some educational purpose) that you can do with a cellphone in a classroom?

Here are Steve Demby's 10:

1) Check the spelling/definition of a word
2) Research a topic
3) Look up reference images
4) Pull up maps (even with satellite imagery)
5) Document a science lab with built in digital camera/video
6) Fact check on the fly
7) Mail questions to the teacher that they might be embarrassed to ask
8) Classroom response system
9) Take quizzes
10) Record and/or listen to podcasts

So post away! If you're reading this post, add a comment with at least one (yet unnamed) way to use cell phones in the classroom. Let's assume that the phone has standard phone capabilities as well as text-messaging, pictures, mp3 sound, video, and Internet. If your idea requires some kind of add-on beyond that (like a stand-alone keyboard) be sure to note that. If you're reading this post on a blog other than Millennial Law Prof, be sure to click over to MLP to leave your idea.

Hit it!

Xers & Balance

As if you needed further proof that Xers are more concerned with balance than their Boomer parents or older sibs, check out the Valorem Law Group.

These are definitely the pragmatic mid-lifers that Howe and Strauss describe.

Students Not So Web-Savvy?

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus reports that sociologist Eszter Hargittai has discovered that students are not as web-savvy as professors might think. Some of her findings seem intuitive. For example, whether someone is web-savvy is related to his or her socioeconomic status. Also, students have difficulty evaluating the credibility of information on the web (e.g., not understanding why Wikipedia doesn't substitute for meatier sources). However, I don't necessarily agree with her definition of "web-savvy." She said that not being familiar with things like "phishing" and "BCC" is not being web-savvy. I'll have to think about that. Here's my favorite quote from the article:

At the beginning of my classes, I tell my students, “I know you don’t think
I know as much as you because I’m older. I assure you, I know way more than you
guys about this.”

I don't know that I'd put it just that way . . .

New Orleans Day 2 (4/21)

Today is an ICW day. The ICW is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is, of course, that I get all my citation teaching done during breaks by keeping the ICW up-to-date with new exercises and answers each year (along with my co-author Christine Hurt). The curse is that, while we have three sets of 18 exercises that we rotate through on a three-year cycle, inevitably either the Bluebook (for which I didn't get one of their offers of free online access -- hmph) or the ALWD Manual (which always remembers me with a free review copy) comes out with a new edition, requiring a scouring of the problems and answers for changes to be made. This year, the scouring is taking place over the newer edition (3d) of the ALWD Manual. The next time we use this set of exercises, I'm guessing we'll be updating for the 4th edition of the ALWD and the 19th edition of the Bluebook. Good times . . .

So anyway, on Day 2 of the NOLA III trip last week, we all split up into our teams and headed out to our placements. I was at Common Ground with a colleauge and four students. Our first day was spent the way many first days at SHN placements are spent: figuring out what they need and how best to accomplish it. With law students coming in and out year-round for one-week stints, it's easy to keep losing some of your institutional memory. Considering the disconnect that the various agencies experience with this revolving door of help, it's amazing how much SHN has managed to move the ball forward on the legal issues affecting New Orleans.

We were told about a couple of issues that Common Ground needed more information about. Many of them seemed to fall under the general category of "New Orleans schools." It seemed like there were issues with charter schools having admissions criteria that made them inaccessible to most students, public schools being far away from many students' homes, and students being expelled for the slightest infraction. It certainly sounded bad.

Sidebar: I was never a big fan of The Bramble Bush. However, during times like Day 2, I'm reminded of Karl Llewellyn's advice that you have to scratch your eyes out and then scratch them back in again. I suppose more modern learning theorists would tell me that we needed to educate ourselves in the particular language and rules of the discourse community of New Orleans education so we could figure out what needed to be done. But it felt more like scratching my eyes out.

So we spent a day trying to figure out the byzantine system of New Orleans schools. There are charter schools and public schools. Some are operated by the Orleans Parish School District; others are operated by something called The Recovery School District (set up in 2003 to help the city's schools recover from low test scores; obviously, "recovery" had taken on a whole new meaning after 2005). Orleans Parish school district operates the handful of high-performing public schools as well as another handful of charter schools with admissions criteria that include prior academic achievement, prior behavior, and parental involvement. The Recovery School District operates everything else. Attendance at all schools is on an "open enrollment" basis, which means that students are not necessarily assigned to schools based on which are closest to their homes. Although students in the Recovery School District get to choose which school they go to, selection for particular schools is done by lottery and requires that the parents navigate a maze of applications and deadlines. Parents who need help can consult the online parents guide that spans 110 pdf pages. I can imagine that a family planning on returning to New Orleans might get easily discouraged after stumbling onto the parents guide and its explanation of the school system. Don't get me wrong: it's a good guide. But it's 110 pages. And it describes a school system unlike any that my team had encountered before. It helps to have not only the guide but also a live person sitting next to you saying, "Yes, this really is how it works."

So we decided that what parents could use was a one- or two-page brochure that made the process more manageable. Fortunately, right around this time, my teammate and colleague Marjorie Silver connected with a local judge, David Bell. Judge Bell is the Chief Judge of the Juvenile Courts in New Orleans and knew a lot about the school system pre-Katrina and post-Katrina, and he could also shed some light on some of the juvenile justice issues Common Ground was concerned about. To our utter amazement and delight, he agreed to come address everyone in NOLA III after our check-in meeting that evening. Judge Bell described innovative programs in the New Orleans juvenile justice system (Google: judge david bell). After he spoke to us about the aftermath of the levee breaches and the changes that had been made in the schools and the juvenile justice system, he offered to set up tours of a variety of schools for the next day. Bingo!

Now we had a mission (create the back-to-school brochure) and a source of first-hand information (school contacts and tours). At the end of Day 2 we were ready to scratch our eyes in again!

Facebook is Taking Over My Life!

I've now had a Facebook profile for about 10 days or so. If you ever wonder if your students will find your Facebook profile, should you decide to put one up, the answer is a resounding yes. Every law professor I've found on Facebook so far has at least a handful of student "friends" associated with their profile. I've picked up quite a few in the last week, owing mostly, I think, to spending nearly a week with a number of them in New Orleans.

I had two goals in setting up the Facebook profile, and I think both have been satisfied already: the first was to provide another way for students to reach me (I like being accessible to them, and I've read that they don't use e-mail as much as they do Facebook for quick communications); the second was to just see what the allure was to providing so much personal information about oneself in such a public forum.

It seems that you have to be that odd combination of computer dork and social butterfly to appreciate Facebook if you're not a Millennial. If you're a Millennial, the skills required to master Facebook don't put you in the "dork" category -- it's just what people know how to do. My husband is a bona fide computer dork -- he makes his living programming electric engines for hybrid dump trucks. But he's not a social butterly. So Facebook doesn't appeal to him at all.

I'm a different story. I love to learn people's stories, and I love sharing mine. Facebook provides a way to be known by someone really quickly. And it provides a way to keep up with everyone in your network really easily. You can literally get up-to-the-minute information on everyone. If one of your friends is reading a new book, enjoying a good meal, making new friends, joining a new Facebook group, contributing money to a cause -- you name it -- you can get all that information in a News Feed on your page. Of course, they get the same information about you. So as you get more information about your friends, Facebook taunts you to include more information about yourself. My friends have a list of books they're reading on their page? Hey, I want a list of books I'm reading on my page, too!

If you thought the Internet could suck time out of your day, you should try Facebook. The amount of information that you can access about others and provide about yourself is limitless. It's addictive.

For the most part, I have to say that I'm impressed that my students' Facebook profiles contain appropriate information. If they were drunk in any of the posted pictures, it's not apparent. Granted, my sample size is exceedingly small and composed primarily of students who just spent their spring break doing volunteer work in Louisiana. So I'll concede that it may not be representative of Millennials on Facebook in general.

This coming fall, I'm planning on providing my Facebook profile to students as a way of communicating with me outside of class. Periodically, I'll check in with how I think that's going and whether it seems to be worthwhile. I'm also thinking about what kind of analogies to Facebook my be helpful to students as they learn to do legal research. I used to use an analogy between legal research and the phonebook. I start with, "How would you find contact information for someone if all you know is her name?" The last time I asked that question, "Facebook" was the answer.

In the meantime, I have to go add more widgets to my Facebook page.