{"id":4232,"date":"2009-03-15T21:14:40","date_gmt":"2009-03-16T02:14:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/?p=4232"},"modified":"2009-03-16T06:53:56","modified_gmt":"2009-03-16T11:53:56","slug":"lunch-bunches-ten-second-chat-and-color-photo-seating-charts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/2009\/03\/lunch-bunches-ten-second-chat-and-color-photo-seating-charts\/","title":{"rendered":"Lunch Bunches, Ten Second Chat, and Color Photo Seating Charts"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I have learned over the years from my two kids, both now adults, that many people, including no doubt law students and potential law students, view law professors as a different breed of animal. \u00a0I guess in my family we do push the envelope since my wife, Margaret Moses, and I are both law professors. The friends of our kids, and, indeed, my law students, are shocked to discover, for example, that in my youth I worked in the factory at what was then the Allen-Bradley company — on the seventh floor of the building with the largest four-sided clock in the world — and that, even in the summer after my first year in law school, I was a truck driver moving people’s household goods from one end of the country to the other. Somehow law professors, even before they are law professors, live such different, abstracted lives that it is beyond comprehension that one of them drove a truck as a summer job or worked in a factory making electrical resistors, whatever they are.<\/p>\n

While my kids no doubt have good reason for thinking that I am weird in various ways, I think of myself as falling within the range of what could be called normal. I want my students to get some chance to agree, or have a closer look to decide that my self-assessment is way off track. So, here are two techniques I use. First, whenever I see a student of mine outside of class, I go out of my way to say hi and to chat: The ten second chat. Students are very aware of us but many are afraid of making the first move when they see us outside of the classroom. Reaching out to them breaks the ice. The downside, of course, is that I get it wrong. Early this semester, I was in the elevator with one of my students, so I started to chat.\u00a0 Unfortunately, she was a student in a different class than I had assumed, so I am sure that she thought I was even weirder than she might have if I had said nothing at all. But it is a risk worth taking.<\/p>\n

Second, I arrange “lunch bunches” with the students in my class.<\/p>\n

I put a signup sheet on my office door and let five, or so, students sign up. We typically go to a neighborhood restaurant, each paying our own tab, and have a nice chance to talk about anything anybody wants to discuss. They get to ask me questions about me, law school, the future, etc., and I get to ask them about themselves, their aspirations and other serious topics. I try to sneak in some advice about their studies and their goals for their professional lives, especially they avoid adopting group norms about career goals that they never really had before they started law school. They accept the advice, with a grain of salt, I am sure. But, just as importantly, we chat about things that normal people talk about. For example, the week before Oscar Sunday, it was movies: Slumdog<\/em> was the consensus for best picture but we had an interesting discussion about whether Heath Ledger would win best supporting actor. All thought he deserved it, but some thought that Oscar voters were so self-centered, they would not vote for someone who had died thereby preventing any reciprocation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Students know us before we know them. I try to match their names with their faces in my conscious mind as quickly as I can. This semester, for the first time, I managed to get color photos downloaded from the online student records system and had them pasted onto my seating charts. It really helps, but the effort that it took to do it – one Associate Dean and my faculty assistant working at it for quite a while – makes me wonder what would happen if everyone on the faculty wanted this. From another angle, I am shocked that the student records system is not set up to make this easy to do, so these could be easily available to all of the faculty for all of their classes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have learned over the years from my two kids, both now adults, that many people, including no doubt law students and potential law students, view law professors as a different breed of animal. \u00a0I guess in my family we do push the envelope since my wife, Margaret Moses, and I are both law professors. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-legal-education","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4232\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}