Well, just law school, actually. But we do have our share of witchcraft and wizardry. We have lingering ghosts and our share of dragons and dementors. Dark and difficult times lie ahead for me and my blockmates.
I’m currently reading and re-reading Duncan Kennedy’s “How Law Schools Fail”, which, unfortunately, doesn’t show up in Google. It’s an article in the Yale Law Review first published in 1970, describing the “malaise” of hostility, myopia, and apathy that polluted Yale Law back then. I might as well be reading about the UP College of Law in 2005: Professors and their arsenal of sadism, their unjustified disdain of subjects outside law. Students dividing into extremes of buying into the system or just settling into stasis. I hope to discuss the article further soon, if only to hold a mirror against the past three years of studying law school, and how it changed (or warped) me so.
I’m also a teacher now, in the UP CMC. I hope that I’ll never have to resort to dominance, to paternalism,to ridicule, to “icy indifference” to teach my lessons. I hope I never forget what the rule-readers and the bureaucrats fail to understand: that beyond the arbitrary walls and narrow categories they cling to, the wings of a thousand butterflies are beating, seeding the atmosphere with storms; that magic can still happen; that the human voice can never really be stilled.
Entries (RSS)