Why I am the nightmare student

First - yes, I did finish the half-marathon despite my head cold. It was great fun. More on that later.

Because right at this moment - despite having a mountain of work to do - I am more inspired by last night's PI class, our second. I'm feeling like the instructor - the lawyer - is spending too much time on "war stories," tales of past cases that are admittedly interesting but have nothing to do with what he's supposed to teach us that night. The people in the class (which shrank from 40 to 28 people, interestingly) seem to eat it up though, like they can't resist a behind-the-scenes perspective of their favorite tv legal drama.

My impatience with this, and with some of my fellow students, is making me realize that I am something of a nightmare student. I attribute this to a few things.

First, the high school I went to was rather eccentric in many ways, not the least of which was that with some exceptions, we weren't actually required to attend class. This gave me the radical belief that education is a two-way social contract: The value of the learning experience should be sufficient to merit the student's time, and if not, the student has the right to boycott. Now I don't think you get to boycott just because something is hard. If a subject is reasonably required of everyone in your situation, you don't get to quit just because you struggle with it, or it isn't your cup of tea. But if it's badly done or makes blatently disrespectful use of your time - it's a poor value exchange and you have the right to balance things out by reclaiming your time and mental energy back. It is for this reason that in high school I learned a great deal of chemistry and US history, and very little physics or geography.

Speaking of US history, here is another reason why - at least in the case of PI school - I am a nightmare student: I already know something about law. More than I realized, actually. My odd high school was in fact a curriculum laboratory at a public university, and in my junior year, the college of education decided it didn't need the lab any more. In order to keep it open, the university integrated it as a stand-alone unit - still a curriculum lab - but in order to make that financially viable, for the first time they accepted regular public school funding from the state of Illinois. This brought with it some rules. One was that the funding was attendance-based, so they started making us go to class (the bastards!). Another was that the state required a one-semester "civics" class of all high school graduates - to ensure every graduate knew the basics about being a good US citizen.

Now in our junior year, we had the most rigorious high school US history class ever created (don't ask me how I know this, but it's true). So, presented with the requirement for a "civics class," school authorities had no idea what they could possibly throw together for our senior year that we hadn't already learned in spades the year before. Because the school was a curriculum lab, some enterprising law professor at the university decided he would use this opportunity to pilot a basic law class for high school students. So we had a one-semester class, taught by college-level law faculty, which covered the basic areas of law (criminal, civil, constitutional, international) and also a trip to the law library with a law student to learn how to look up case law. It was great. Plus the girls all thought the professor was really hot, which was a big plus at that age. Unfortunately, I think the class was only around for a couple years and then the handsome professor got busy or bored and it ended, like so many experiments at that school. (Like the semester of formal logic required in my 7th-grade year, which trained every one of my classmates to score in the 95th percentile on those damned "logical reasoning" sections of standardized aptitude tests.)

Anyway, it seems like more of that material stuck with me than I realized.

The last reason I am a nightmare student is because I have taught. Not as my main profession, but I've taught graudate-level classes and numerous workshops for colleagues. My mantra is, if I'm going to get dinged for the amount of substantive content in my class, let it always be said that I covered too much rather than too little. I'm fanatical about making things substantive and applicable, and I know that with some work, this is a completely reasonable thing to accomplish as a teacher. So I expect the same courtesy when I'm in the student's chair.

So, I hope the class gets a little more focused, but I have to admit, if majority rules, the majority of people seem to be grooving on the war stories. I don't feel like the war stories meet my usefulness standard for the educational social contract, and to add insult to injury, attendance of 8 of 10 sessions is required to pass the class. It just goes against my grain. Damn radical upbringing.