Back in the Bottle?

When law school classes resumed this week after spring break, all of the 199 ABA accredited law schools were teaching their students online. There were surely hardships and hiccups, technical glitches, and perhaps some inept professors and students...but the screams of outrage have been muted. On the contrary: the feedback from blog posts, the twitter feeds and the like has had a tone of enthusiasm. At Miami Law, where I have a (virtual) front row seat, Dean Tony Varona has noted

I have seen many silver linings over the last couple of weeks. Our community has come together in ways that make us very proud. Acts of kindness abound. Many of our colleagues are stretching themselves to do extraordinary work in support of the greater law school community. As just one example, the members of our IT team have been nothing short of heroic in their efforts. Our faculty colleagues have been putting into place innovative teaching approaches that leverage the advantages of distance learning and, very likely, will inform and elevate their teaching once we return to physical classrooms. Our students are learning in new and exciting and challenging ways. As one of my senior faculty colleagues put it, “we are hurtling into the future.” He’s right.

It is a way to fight the coronavirus, a refusal to let it destroy the educational choices the students have made and the teaching careers faculty have chosen. It is also much too early to assess how well it will work, or to know for how long the experiment must continue.The United States, in very rough numbers, has some

  • 40 million students in K 1-12 schools
  • 18 million students in colleges and universities, and
  • 3 million  students in graduate programs

Are they now all being taught online? No, but a very large number of them will be for the rest of this semester--and in some cases, perhaps part of the next. The pull to return to physical classrooms will be enormous: for all the reasons that have ever existed plus, perhaps, what will be an overwhelming desire to return to normalcy. That said, one thing is clear: the genie will never quite go back in the bottle! However the pandemic ends, and end it will, education's landscape, including that of the law schools, will never be the same.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Avoiding the Abyss?

Image
Given the primal necessity of survival, our current focus is on ordering our societies to cope with the critical health issues of Corvid-19. The jury is still out on whether we will manage to do this without being overwhelmed by agonizing, staggering costs in human lives and and suffering. We have seen what happens or looms in densely packed populations in epicenters ranging from Wuhan to Italy to Spain to New York. What threatens to emerge in countries shut by walls of silence, or refugee camps and prison populations, does not bear thinking about...too painful. But we are human. No matter what else is happening, we need water, food and shelter. And to the extent not struck down by personal disaster, we need to try to order as best we can the modalities of our everyday existence. In the world of law, that is those who administer justice, or deliver legal services, or educate those whose job it will be to do this in the future. All of these must--with great urgency--adapt. In part,...
Read more
  MUSINGS: When the Internet died during Hurricane Laura   Without the Internet—surprise!—much that one takes for granted in everyday life goes swoosh. The major things are obvious, but it’s the small, niggling things that come as a shock. Like…I wanted to write this on my computer where I have the choice of Word, Pages, and Google docs. But I can’t! All of these programs are online, and I am not! To the rescue? Text Edit, that long forgotten remnant of a prior age, but (thank you, Apple) still available and perfectly functional.   Why did I want to write? Well, I am tired of the hesitant, stuttering connectivity of weak cellular networks delivering (or not) tweets and texts and maybe email. I want something that has flow! A few minutes ago, my eye fell on Elias Canetti’s, The Voices of Marrakesh ; I’d pulled it off the shelf to reread the opening story, Encounters with Camels , deeply and powerfully disturbing each and every time. But this time it put me in mind of somet...
Read more